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I’ve been prompted to add my own contribution to the Lessons for Girls meme kicked off by Historiann by some new research on gender and pay (in)equity. The research on the technology sector shows that even in this relatively new industry, which you might expect to be free of the shackles of historically embedded gender inequities, women still earn on average $5,000 less than men in jobs where in all other respects (skills, experience, qualifications) they are on an equal footing.
Why is this? One reason is that in a competitive world, if you don’t ask for something – or even vociferously demand it – you’re not going to get it. And it seems that too many women simply don’t ask.
AbsoluteIT director Grant Burley says the extent of the difference between the earning power of men and women – approximately $5,000 – was a surprise. He puts it down to the fact women don’t always negotiate as aggressively as men when they’re offered jobs.
“As a recruitment firm, we see evidence of that – when job offers are made, there’s less bargaining from female candidates”.
When we are less assertive than men in our pay negotiations, it may only make a small initial difference between what we earn and what our male colleagues earn. But that small difference gets magnified over time when annual raises or bonuses are based on a percentage of base salary. Dr Crazy recently ran some numbers for academia which showed how big the gap in salaries can become over the long term when women don’t hold out for what they want (and deserve) early in their careers.
So why don’t we women put more monetary value on what we bring to the workplace? As a girl, I was brought up to take what I was given without complaint, so when I started working, I believed that asking for more made me ungrateful and greedy. I thought that if I displayed a forthright interest in money, it would be seen as a sign of flawed character and might even prompt my potential employer to withdraw their offer in distaste. It was many years before I got past the unspoken conviction that bargaining for higher pay was somehow classless and, dare I say it, ‘unladylike’. I hope you can learn from my mistakes.
When you get that job offer, don’t immediately say yes. Don’t take the first offer on the table out of unwarranted gratitude for even being considered for the role. And don’t fall into the trap of thinking, ‘they really want me, but they’ve said they can’t afford to offer me more’. You are always worth more than their first offer and they expect you to negotiate. If you had a Y chromosome, you’d bargain as a matter of course. Consider your many talents, your experience, the qualifications you worked so hard to attain. And then ASK FOR MORE. Believe me, you would if you were a man. And if you don’t, nobody is going to just up and give it to you.
Money is not inherently dirty and it is not a character flaw in women to want more of it (within reason – I’m not saying we should start channelling Gordon Gekko). Asking to be properly remunerated for what you do doesn’t make you arrogant or selfish or greedy. Dealing fairly but firmly in pay negotiations does not make you an aggressive bitch. It makes you smart.
Updated: This post sparked some lively discussion over at Historiann and at The Chronicle of Higher Education - check out the comment threads.
Oh, and in case anyone thinks I believe that all it takes to close the pay gap is for women to get better at salary negotiation, here's a refresher on pay equity and patriarchal equilibrium.
These are darkening days for the female population of New Zealand. This week, the news came out that the Department of Labour’s Pay and Employment Equity Unit has been ‘disestablished’ (that’s bureaucratic weasel-speak for binned). Earlier this year, a couple of its major investigations were scrapped based on a specious argument for ‘pay restraint’ – that is to say, the government simply can’t afford to redress gender-based pay imbalances. Sadly, the move has come as no great surprise to me. The centre-right National government elected last November has been ‘reprioritising’ government spending, and using the convenient excuse of the global financial crisis to gut programmes aimed at combating discrimination and promoting social justice. It's par for the course. The last time a National government was elected, back in 1990, its first move was to repeal the Employment Equity Act.
There was an excellent and wide-ranging roundtable across several history blogs back in March, where feminist scholars discussed historian Judith M. Bennett’s book History Matters: Patriarchy and the Challenge of Feminism. Bennett specialises in the history of non-elite women in late medieval/early modern England. Her thesis in History Matters is that when a long-term perspective is applied to the historical analysis of women’s and men’s status in society (legal rights, economic conditions and so on), it becomes clear that what she terms "patriarchal equilibrium" is at work. So while conditions for women have improved over the centuries, those for men have also improved, with the result that in absolute terms, men preserve their privileged position in society. Bennett uses the example of wage rates, pointing out that the gap between what men and women earn for the same types of work hasn’t really closed much at all since the later Middle Ages. It has drifted up and down a bit, but over the long term, women have consistently earned between about 50 and 80 percent of what men earn for the same work.
So check this out: According to recent statistics reported by the Department of Labour, New Zealand women earn 78.9% of men’s average weekly earnings, and 86.7% of men’s average hourly earnings. 
The graph at right, from Statistics New Zealand, shows patriarchal equilibrium in action*. Over the last few years, men and women both benefited from the country’s economic boom and hourly rates have climbed, but as you can clearly see, the gap between women’s wages and men’s wages has nonetheless remained pretty constant. Now that the boom times are over, there is going to be additional pressure on women’s lower wages. At the same time, the message coming loud and clear from the National government (all naturally rolling in fat pay packets themselves) is that as a nation, pay equity is ‘a luxury we can’t afford’. With the dissolution of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit, those at the bottom of the privilege pile are once again being asked to sacrifice themselves at the altar of economic best interests.
Once upon a time, we Kiwis could be proud of our progressive stance on women’s rights. In 1893, New Zealand became the first self-governing nation in which women won the fight for full suffrage. We’ve had two women Prime Ministers and women have held the posts of chief justice, attorney general and governor-general. But the evidence of a handful of women in senior leadership positions doesn’t nullify the argument that there are still systemic gender-based inequities in our society – although that is what National’s Justice Minister Simon Power tried to suggest this week in the face of criticism from the UN Human Rights Committee.
For those of us who’ve been around the block more than a few times and who have taken to the streets in the past to protest discrimination of all kinds, the disbanding of the Pay and Employment Equity Unit feels like the first shot across the bows. I’m fully expecting to see further retroactive moves. My guess? Restricting access to abortion will soon be back on the agenda in the interests of ‘protecting family values’, while reducing the Domestic Purposes Benefit (for single parents, most of whom are women) and/or tightening the eligibility criteria will be another ideological move made in the guise of ‘reducing government spending in these tough economic times’.
I wonder what the situation is like in other countries. Are you seeing similar retrenchments being made in anti-discrimination and broadly social justice-based programmes under cover of reining in spending in a screwed economy? And for any New Zealanders reading, am I on the money here? If so, what do you think will be next in National’s firing line?
* For more on New Zealand, check out this paper presented at the 2001 Women’s Studies Association Conference. Amongst other things, the authors discuss statistics showing continued under-representation and under-valuing of women in academia and the public sector.
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