To eliminate the gender gap in paychecks, women must know how to ask for higher salaries comparable to their male colleagues, the proponents of a Boston initiative argue.
AAUW Work Smart, a partnership between the nonprofit American Association of University Women (AAUW) and the Mayor’s Office of Women’s Advancement, offers free salary-negotiation workshops to any woman who lives or works in Boston. At libraries, YWCAs and community centers, volunteer professionals coach participants on coping with their anxiety to effectively ask for a pay bump. Since the program’s 2015 launch, AAUW has hosted 72 workshops from downtown to Dorchester, reaching 1,700 women in the process. And that’s only a small slice of the goal: Over the next four years, AAUW Work Smart intends to reach 85,000, or half of Boston’s working women.
“If I’m working on the same project with the same job and same responsibilities, and I’m getting 64 percent less money than [my male colleague] does, that psychologically brings you down. It doesn’t empower you as an employee. It doesn’t motivate you to do the best of your ability,” says Kristina Desir, AAUW Work Smart’s program manager. Through the two-hour interactive workshops, “we’re trying to get women to get pay equity on their own.”
Nationally, women make 80 cents for every dollar a man makes. Over the course of a year, that adds up to a $10,470 difference, on average, for full-time, year-round workers. In Boston, as in the rest of the country, the racial gap compounds the problem. There, Asian women make only 77 cents for every dollar a white male takes home; black women, 63 cents; and Hispanic women, 52 cents.
Megan Costello, executive director of the Office of Women’s Advancement, doesn’t view those numbers simply as a feminist matter. The wage gap affects the city’s entire economy, she explains. ”If the majority of our city is underpaid and not paid what they’re worth, that not only hurts them as individuals but it hurts their families, their communities, and it hurts the entire city of Boston,” she told WBUR, the local public radio station. “So this is the right thing to do, but it is also important to the economic vitality of the city.”
To improve the stats, Desir’s workshops dispel the typical anxieties: “The fear of employers saying no, the fear of missing out on a job.” First, she focuses on teaching women to know their worth, to quantify the value they bring to a company. The instructors — many of whom come from Morgan Stanley — then demonstrate how to find industry-wide standards for salaries and benefits online. They also walk the women through different negotiation strategies, like asking for a better title even without a pay raise. After that, in pairs, the women practice role-playing as a manager and an employee asking for more pay.
There’s been some encouraging anecdotal results from Work Smart so far — one woman, for example, negotiated a 40 percent raise — and the model is expanding nationally, most recently to Washington, D.C., and San Jose and Long Beach, Calif. But Desir cautions that workshops alone won’t eliminate the gender gap in salaries. She hopes that, by teaching women how to advocate for themselves, the culture at large will start to shift and that one day, the burden won’t fall on women to demand what they rightly deserve.
Tag: City Innovation
Santa Fe is Changing the Rules in the War on Drugs
According to Santa Fe police captain, Jermone Sanchez, cops are “chasing the same people over and over again,” since there’s a repeat cast of opiate addicts committing 100 percent of the city’s burglaries and other property crimes.
So what is the southwest city doing to reduce the number of repeat offenders?
Back in July 2013, the city voted to launch the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (or LEAD).The pilot initiative involves the Santa Fe police department, the district attorney’s office and public defenders, City Hall, various nonprofits and the Drug Policy Alliance of New Mexico.
Under this progressive program, which is already at work in Seattle, Wash., instead of becoming prisoners, people arrested for low-level drug offenses are given the option of becoming a “client” before they’re booked.
These clients are then assigned a case manager that offers an individualized regimen of not only “drug treatment, but also housing, transportation, and even employment support programs,” according to the Nation. Since initiating the program this April, Santa Fe has enrolled 10 offenders in LEAD.
Interestingly, participants don’t get in trouble for relapsing, and while they can be thrown out of the program, that will only occur if they commit a serious crime, reports the Nation.
Emily Kaltenback, state director of the Drug Policy Alliance, first proposed getting addicts into comprehensive treatment instead of constantly cramming up the courts and jail; she’s since won over the collaborative support of the “Santa Fe Police Department, City Hall, nonprofit service providers, the District Attorney’s office, and public defenders.”
Sanchez and Kaltenbach both believe that this program and ones like it are the best chance at overcoming the societal hardships drugs create. It also doesn’t hurt that the Santa Fe Community Foundation also thinks that LEAD could eliminate half of the $1.5 million it currently spends on the drug war.
Already, the City Council pledged to spend $300,000 on the program over the next three years, and new training for police officers begins this month.
The buzz of LEAD has made it to the east coast, too, with New York City Mayor Bill DeBlasio recently announcing the start of the Public Health Diversion Center to route low-level offenders into treatment, health and welfare services instead of jail.
Safer streets on a lower budget? Count us in.
Want a Free House? Write Two Paragraphs to Win It
It’s like a writer-in-residence program, only permanent. A clever new nonprofit called Write-a-House is giving away homes in Detroit to a select few writers, in the hopes that it’ll entice them to come to the city and stay.
The goal is to support writers in need and, ultimately, to bolster Detroit’s growing creative community. At the same time, Write-a-House hopes to revitalize Detroit’s neighborhoods: it purchased abandoned homes in a high-vacancy part of town and it’s working with another nonprofit, Detroit Young Builders, which gives at-risk youth training in construction, to renovate the houses before giving them away.
Low-income writers of any stripe — journalists, authors, poets, etc. — and from anywhere are eligible to apply for the residency. The winners, chosen by a panel of literary types, will be asked to finish the renovations, live in their house for two years, blog about it for Write-a-House and actively participate in the local literary community. Then, they’ll get the deed.
The first three houses under renovation are all within walking distance of each other in a working-class, mostly Bangladeshi and African-American neighborhood north of Hamtramck. If all goes as planned, Write-a-House will fix up another three homes in another neighborhood the following year and then do it all over again the year after that.
“Our long, long term goal involves building a literary colony in Detroit,” Write-a-House says on its website. Who knows? Maybe years from now kids will be studying the Detroit Literary Renaissance in English class.