Important item for consideration

Linda Babcock has an article on ABC which should be required reading for all workers, particularly working women. In it, she talks about her research with Deborah Small, Michele Gelfand, and Hillary Gettman into women's willingness to negotiate higher salaries. While the particular study she discusses might not be very significant, some of her findings may be. Most strikingly, by not negotiating salaries, women give up an average of half a million dollars during their careers.

Hopefully, by hearing about research like this, more women will better understand the control they have over their employment and how they can empower themselves to earn more money throughout their lives.

How Avoiding Negotiations Hurts Women
ABC News

I spend most of Sept. 19 at the campus of Arizona State University, conducting a negotiation study with "Good Morning America" cameras rolling. The study was based on my paper with colleagues Deborah Small, Michele Gelfand and Hillary Gettman.

Study participants signed up for our project, knowing they would be paid between $5 and $12 for their time. When they arrived, they played a game of Boggle. When they were finished, our graduate student experimenter, Justin, went up to a participant and said, "Here is $5. Is $5 okay?"

We were, of course, watching to see who negotiated for more money. In the ASU study, we found that many more men negotiated than women. In our original paper, this gender difference was extremely large - more than eight times as many men as women negotiated (2.6 percent of women versus 22.9 percent of men.)

And not only did men negotiate more often, the cameras revealed another striking difference: The men seemed extremely confident in asking for more money, while the women who did negotiate seemed very tentative. This was reinforced by the interviews that Tory Johnson conducted with the participants after the study.