One of the greatest mistakes a recent grad or job candidate can make is failing to negotiate in fear of being passed on, says Roli Wendorf.
“Sometimes students who are fresh out of college may not understand it”™s a two-way street,” said Roli Wendorf, a pay equity leader at the American Association of University Women (AAUW), Westchester chapter. “You need the job, but the employer needs somebody to do the work. They think, ”˜If I ask, they won”™t like me,”™ but the worst they will say is, ”˜This is my final offer, take it or leave it.”™”
At a recent SmartStart workshop at SUNY Purchase, the organization in partnership with global nonprofit The WAGE Project presented a program on benchmarking your starting salary and subsequent negotiation.
“Currently, women earn $.77 for every dollar a man earns,” said Jane Pendergast, a presenter. “Hispanic women earn only $.57 cents for every man. College grads earn, on average, over their lifetimes $1.2 million less than men. What would you do with $1.2 million? That”™s a house. That”™s investments.”
The AAUW Westchester has 200 members and is part of a global network; the group works with colleges across the nation bringing equal pay and negotiation workshops to college campuses.
“We found that with the down economy, it was especially harder (to bring schools onboard to host workshops),” Wendorf said. “They thought, ”˜Our students are having a tough time getting jobs and we don”™t want to focus on pay-negotiation skills,”™ but the reality is, even if you”™re accepting a job which is a little less than your capability, you still need to negotiate and get a better salary.”
The employer who is interviewing you often leaves some margin and will not want to lose a solid candidate, Wendorf said.
For information, visit wageproject.org.
No legislation yet has closed the gender wage gap — not the 1963 Equal Pay for Equal Work Act, not Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, not the 1978 Pregnancy Discrimination Act, not the 1991 amendments to Title VII, not affirmative action (which has benefited mostly white women, the group most vocal about the wage gap), not diversity, not the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, not the countless state and local laws and regulations, not the horde of overseers at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission….. Nor would the Paycheck Fairness Act work.
That’s because pay-equity advocates, at no small financial cost to taxpayers and the economy, continue to overlook the effects of this female AND male behavior:
Despite the 40-year-old demand for women’s equal pay, millions of wives still choose to have no pay at all. In fact, according to Dr. Scott Haltzman, author of “The Secrets of Happily Married Women,” stay-at-home wives, including the childless who represent an estimated 10 percent, constitute a growing niche. “In the past few years,†he says in a CNN report at http://tinyurl.com/6reowj, “many women who are well educated and trained for career tracks have decided instead to stay at home.†(“Census Bureau data show that 5.6 million mothers stayed home with their children in 2005, about 1.2 million more than did so a decade earlier….†at http://tinyurl.com/qqkaka. If more women are staying at home, perhaps it’s because feminists and the media have told women for years that female workers are paid less than men in the same jobs — so why bother working if they’re going to be penalized and humiliated for being a woman.)
As full-time mothers or homemakers, stay-at-home wives earn zero. How can they afford to do this while in many cases living in luxury? Because they’re supported by their husband, an “employer†who pays them to stay at home.
Both feminists and the media ignore what this obviously implies: If millions of wives are able to accept no wages and live as well as their husbands, millions of other wives are able to accept low wages, refuse overtime and promotions, work part-time instead of full-time (“According to a 2009 UK study by Cristina Odone for the Centre for Policy Studies, only 12 per cent of the 4,690 women surveyed wanted to work full time.†http://bit.ly/ihc0tl), take more unpaid days off, avoid uncomfortable wage-bargaining (http://tinyurl.com/45ecy7p) — all of which lower women’s average pay. They are able to make these choices because they are supported, or anticipate being supported, by a husband who must earn more than if he’d chosen never to marry. (Still, even many men who shun marriage, unlike women, feel their self worth is tied to their net worth.) This is how MEN help create the wage gap. If the roles were reversed so that men raised the children and women raised the income, men would average lower pay than women.
See “A Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act†at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu
Good advice. Career Centers don’t have the resources to provide the valuable advice you offer.
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