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: gender pay gap
It’s Official. This Demographic Has Just About Eliminated the Wage Gap
Millennials are trying to change the world, especially when it comes to work. And according to new research by PayScale and Millennial Branding, it appears that Millennials are doing just that — this time, by reducing the gender pay gap.
The study, conducted by PayScale and Millennial Branding, assessed the pay difference for Baby Boomers, Generation X and Millennials (those born between 1982 and 2002). It found that the discrepancy among this generation is the lowest of all, though it increases as employees climb the career ladder.
For entry-level jobs, the salary difference for Millennials was 2.2 percent; Baby Boomers came in at 2.7 percent, while Generation X is highest at 3.6 percent, according to the National Journal. As employees rise in the ranks, though, the gap widens. Millennials now report a 4.9 percent difference while Baby Boomers are at 6.2 percent and Generation X is at 7.4 percent.
This change could be attributed to employers’ awareness and conviction that men and women are equal in the workforce.
“Employers are more aware and are trying to get ahead of any potential gender bias in terms of pay,” Lydia Frank of PayScale tells National Journal.
Despite, the larger numbers for higher-level jobs, entry-level positions are actually the best indicator for the future pay scale. Higher wages for entry-level jobs indicate future increased earnings. Therefore, if there is a smaller pay gap in the beginning, there’s a good chance that trend will continue as employees progress through their careers.
There are a few important things for Millennials to remember about the work environment, though. First, show your worth in the beginning and talk to your employer about what your salary because it will benefit you later in your career.
“If you don’t negotiate in that first job, it compounds over time,” Millennial workplace expert Lindsey Pollak says. “You won’t necessarily be able to make up for it later.”
Second, Millennials are also known as the boomerang generation because they switch from career to career. While it’s important to find a job you like, employers will reward employees who are loyal and stay with the company, so it may be worth sticking it out for a few years.
“I’ve seen a lot of boomerang careers among younger workers,” Pollak explains to National Journal. “They think the grass is always greener, but that’s not always the case.”
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Could Making Salaries Public End the Gender Pay Gap?
Journalism circles are abuzz with speculation about why the first woman to take arguably the most prominent role in the industry was, by all accounts, fired with little fanfare last Wednesday for her two-and-a-half years of service.
One of the possible reasons provided for this unexpected dismissal: Jill Abramson may have asked too many questions about pay parity. But one writer has a possible solution to this troubling situation facing females — more salary transparency.
The oft-studied gender pay gap has become a touchstone in the modern workplace. As more women graduate college and demand job parity, they want (and deserve) equal pay, too. It’s not just a philosophical debate, but one that impacts families, poverty rates, and a host of socio-economic issues.
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Experts have suggested that flexible work schedules and pay scales that depend on output — not hours logged at a desk — could rewrite the pay equity debate. Publicizing salaries also has the potential to change salary inequalities. As the Quartz column notes, staying mum on salary information helps employers, not employees. “Making pay more transparent won’t close the gap on its own, but it puts a burden on companies to at least explain any disparity, and begin to resolve them,” writer Max Nisen notes.
Some firms have started posting salary information on the web. And the salaries of most government employees are public record. The Gray Lady may not be that agile, nor so inclined. But as the fallout from a story that turned a glass ceiling into a glass cliff continues, perhaps it’s time to revisit our assumptions about who knows what when it comes to salary equality.
The Surprising Key to Closing the Gender Pay Gap
Dr. Claudia Goldin has a novel solution for the pesky pay gap that persists between men and women, and its benefits could extend well beyond the workplace.
Goldin, a Harvard University economist, hypothesizes that if companies allow employees to work flexible schedules and reward them based on what they actually accomplish — not the hours they toil away in the office — the pay gap between men and women will be whittled away. “The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might even vanish if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who worked long hours and who worked particular hours,” she writes in a study published in the American Economic Review. To boil it down, according to Goldin’s extensive research, the wage gap isn’t just about gender. It’s about time. Literally.
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The oft-cited statistic about the gender gap is that a woman earns 77 cents for every $1 a man makes. This, of course, doesn’t account for the fact that women often choose lower-paying careers. They also choose to leave the workforce at certain points — many times due to family responsibilities — meaning that they actually have less work experience than men when they get into the latter part of their careers, as Derek Thompson points out in The Atlantic. Still, when you adjust for all those variables, a wage gap of around 9 percent persists. Goldin argues that this isn’t due to straight-out discrimination, but rather, hours worked.
Say a woman and a man are up for a promotion in a corporate job. They have similar qualifications and are equally strong candidates. The only thing that distinguishes them is that the man logged more hours overall because the woman took maternity leave or stayed home with a sick child from time to time. Because of these common scenarios, men often end up getting the promotion simply because they have spent more time working. It’s not exactly fair, but it’s not unfair either, given that they have equal qualifications.
Instead of focusing on the standard 9-to-5 (and then some) workday, which has been the norm for generations, Goldin suggests that companies give their employees more autonomy, allowing them to create schedules that work for their lifestyles. In order to do this, Goldin recommends a pay-per-hour policy, which has been proven to lessen the wage gap between male and female workers. For example, pharmacists are paid in a “linear” fashion, meaning that men and women on the same level get paid the same amount. The more hours they work, the more they get paid, and vice-versa. There’s no cultural penalty for leaving work at a normal hour to get dinner on the table. Coincidentally, this profession boasts some of the lowest gender pay gaps among high-earning occupations.
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Of course, it’s not easy to change work culture, especially in corporations where face time is often considered more important than actual productivity. However, flexible work schedules can lead to a range of positive results beyond lessening the gender pay gap. It encourages telecommuting, which cuts down on a company’s operations costs, reduces traffic (a bonus for the environment), and increases productivity. Working too many hours is also proven to increase stress, reduce productivity and decrease overall happiness. Not to mention the fact that many people work extra hours without extra pay. Work flexibility will not only help even out the wage gap, but could also breed happier, healthier employees. Who wouldn’t want that?
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