8 ms·

I'm a little surprised that there is a serious concern that this article doesn't address with gender-gapped salaries, though, and it's been touched upon several

I'm a little surprised that there is a serious concern that this article doesn't address with gender-gapped salaries, though, and it's been touched upon several times on HN. Women tend to negotiate starting salaries and raises much less than men do, to the point where it can skew wage statistics by a nontrivial amount. There was someone on HN a while ago who hired several engineers, and said that his company pays women less than men because he makes the same starting offer to several people, and almost all the men asked for more money, yet none of the women did. So the offers the company made were "fair", but the end results were very skewed wages. There are entire books about this subject, such as "Women Don't Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation"[1] Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation (Didn't Fog Creek do this?), or making all employees salaries transparent (countries like Norway do this, and we do this for C-levels often in the US, just not plain old employees). I suspect nothing institutional will change though because it would ultimately cost companies money. They benefit too much from workers who negotiate poorly. [1] http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0553383876

breischl 13y ago
I suspect it will not change because stopping negotiation is not actually achievable. Certainly you could disallow negotiation for direct, monetary compensation, but that would just push the negotiation into other areas. People would start negotiating for more vacation, more holidays, better benefits, a bigger office, a company car, an assistant, a private "education budget" (ie, pay me to take a vacation) or whatever else they can. The number of ways to compensate someone are limited only by imagination and can move much more quickly than regulation can catch up. A small example of this is when the US froze wages during World War 2, thus employers started offering perks like company-paid health insurance. That has since evolved into the mess we have now - that sure worked out great for everyone, didn't it?
- phillmv 13y ago
  Intra (small) company you could achieve this - "sorry, everyone gets the same deal: $x0k/year and y weeks of vacay and we only have one company benefits plan". Gets trickier once if you're immense and have very specific skillset requirements.
  - TylerE 13y ago
    That seems like a really perverse incentive. Seems like you're asking people to do JUST enough to not get fired.
fossuser 13y ago
Exactly what I was thinking (I remember that previous HN comment too). I'd also suspect younger people negotiate less and people who are newer in the cycle of generational wealth (don't have someone helping them understand the process). Maybe since there are fewer women in engineering and friendships tend to generally be segregated by sex they don't have people to talk to about this kind of negotiation which further compounds the issue.
faet 13y ago
"Women are penalized more than men for negotiating," Babcock tells Alex Cohen. "People are less likely to like them; if they negotiate in a job interview, they are less likely to hire them. There are real social sanctions that occur when women initiate negotiations." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12529237 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252923...
- Nursie 13y ago
  You know that study is based on role-play, not reality, right?
  - jrarredondo 13y ago
    But wouldn't the experiments at least indicate the possibility that they reflect reality?
    - Nursie 13y ago
      Definitely worth looking into, you certainly can't tell a lot from that npr article. Who did the role play? We're they a random assortment of psych students or people who had actually been on both sides of the table? Is there a good reason to think these classroom results hold up outside?
      - GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
        There has been no global warming since 1998.
  - 001sky 13y ago
    you mean this? http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/08/11/More-assertive-women-judged-negatively/UPI-59241218498284/ http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/08/11/More-assertive-wom... or this? http://vault.hanover.edu/~altermattw/social/assets/w12papers/Sims.pdf http://vault.hanover.edu/~altermattw/social/assets/w12papers... or maybe this? http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/womencareerresearchbyoreilly.html http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/womencareerresearc...
ManFromUranus 13y ago
>Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation Fix what? What are they "fixing"? They seem to be fixing the problem of people being able to do better than default. Exiting times we live in...
- _delirium 13y ago
  Well, if a company both: 1) didn't negotiate wage offers; but 2) offered wages lower than people were willing to accept... they would end up with not enough employees. So it's not like they could just offer whatever they wanted. I'm not sure it will work, but it seems to be the wage-side proposal of what e.g. Saturn is trying to do with cars: just say, look, this is our price, take it or leave it. Rather than the traditional car (and salary) pricing model where the real price you're willing to agree to is hidden, and arrived at via a negotiation process. That often results in whoever's better at negotiating getting the better deal. Now if it's a negotiating job that might even be a good thing, because the better negotiators are more valuable to you. Or if it's a job where the skill you're looking for correlates highly with being good at negotiating. But if that's not the case, just making the final offer of what you're willing to pay up front, rather than starting lower and negotiating upwards, could be better idea. Then rather than negotiating per-candidate, you just adjust your offer policy until it's high enough to get the kind of candidates you want.
  - nsxwolf 13y ago
    The lack of flexibility seems to be a real problem, even when the compensation package is competitive. What if you really want a person, but they turn down the offer because they just need a little more?
    - nitrogen 13y ago
      You could give them what they want, and extend the same offer to all current and future employees of the same skill level.
- Crito 13y ago
  It's the Harrison Bergeron method of pursuing equality. Instead of pulling up the disadvantaged, the advantaged are artificially limited. Prejudices and handicaps limiting the disadvantaged (in this case, prejudices against women who negotiate) are considered to be unchangeable facts of life; correcting those prejudices is not even considered. I think that instead of disallowing negotiation at all, we could look to university job courses (the ones that currently teach resume and interviewing skills) to teach negotiation skills and techniques. It would be something that any student could find valuable. Not only would it make young people entering the job market more comfortable with the idea of negotiation, but it would make people on the company side of things more familiar and comfortable with the notion of women negotiating (correcting that prejudice, instead of accepting/ignoring it as the Bergeron-solution does). If that proves unsuccessful, then less "personal" negotiation processes could be explored before the idea of negotiation was written off entirely. Perhaps sending a form letter with every offer letter saying something along the lines of "I'm sorry but I have to decline [position] because I've received a better offer of [$] from [company]" could work. Some sort of more forumalic approach to negotiation that reduces the human element (and therefore hopefully, the opportunity for human prejudices to manifest. I think that it is best to combat the prejudices however, not work around them).
Nursie 13y ago
And if I get a better offer from another workplace, but you think the extra 10k I'm asking for will be more than offset by the productivity gains I'm bringing to the table? You'll happily turn me down and get a worse team? Not really a world I want to live in.
- _delirium 13y ago
  It's a complex problem because there are feedback effects, but I think often that is a better decision for companies. Otherwise you end up with the situation where the people who are constantly threatening to leave get paid more, and the people who are spending their time doing actual work, rather than polishing their resumes and interviewing around, get paid less. This then incentivizes people who actually don't want to leave to go out and start collecting offers so they can argue better for a raise, which is a huge waste of their time and effort. Taking one decision in isolation, it might be better to pay someone $10k more to keep them from leaving. But it might be better structurally to come up with a different policy for allocating raises than "allocate them to the people who negotiate most hardball". Unless, maybe, it's a sales job, where being good at negotiating is precisely the skill you want to reward.
  - Nursie 13y ago
    I kinda meant negotiating a starting salary rather than a raise. I tend to have found in the past that raises happen with relative frequency when you're good at what you do, and I'm not the type to threaten to leave - if it's got that far I've made my decision.
- thedufer 13y ago
  > you think the extra 10k I'm asking for will be more than offset by the productivity gains I'm bringing to the table Then your initial offer wasn't made in good faith. No-negotiation forces the person making the offer to actually consider what that hire would be worth, and offer accordingly.
  - Nursie 13y ago
rch 13y ago
Some women might not press for raises (in some industries), but I have learned a ton about negotiation from female friends of mine. Like the director-level person at the last place I worked who started with literally twice the vacation days I had, just for example. And the family member who is simply always evaluating opportunities; she might take a first offer, but that is just a piece of data to her (i.e. if you're making it her problem to ask for more, then you're already at a disadvantage). And don't underestimate the effect of networking among talented professional women either. Another friend of mine casually mentioned she was uncertain about a new boss during a ski trip and she immediately had solid options in better environments, one of which she took. Other industries may lag, but it's fairly well established here that employers in technical and engineering fields are stuck with an increasingly difficult challenge of attracting and retaining talent. If you're not doing this proactively across the board already, then I'd love to know why.
tomsaffell 13y ago
When I started dating my (now) wife, she didn't negotiate her salary, and was at a company where other people did. I helped her figure out what to ask for, how to negotiate, and how to feel good about it. We built a spreadsheet to arm her with some data (e.g. salary compared to inflation). It worked. I hope by mentioning it that other people might do similarly.
- ed209 13y ago
  sounds great. Any chance of a quick how-to? I'm a male and I've never negotiated a salary either.
  - pkamb 13y ago
    http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
    - gohrt 13y ago
      I have wasted many hours of my life+productivity on HN, but this one URL (which I found on HN) has more than made up for it. Employees, take it to heart. Employers, you have been warned.
      - bjeanes 13y ago
        Indeed. That was very insightful. It's interesting to see the things I've arguably done well in past negotiations and those that I did poorly...
  - fleitz 13y ago
    As with anything it's about practice, negotiation is an art. For an unskilled negotiator the best thing to know is your BATNA. A great rule of thumb is if people aren't saying no you didn't ask for enough. The first time I negotiated I shot way over, apparently even the lawyer didn't make that much, my reply was that the lawyers work usually wasn't scalable across multiple clients and that any code I made was a capital good that could be resold again and again generating value in the company for years, then I pulled out a sales spreadsheet showing how the code I wrote for various product lines brought additional revenue to the company and then multiplied by the average length on the contract. (Make a really big number and ask for a small part of it). Needless to say I was so successful in my negotiations that I was no longer allowed to have access to sales data. The best part is once you negotiate a good salary you can use it in future negotiations as an indication of skill to get even better salaries. (eg. Does the competitor want to steal the $50K per year coder, or the $250K per year coder?)
ap22213 13y ago
Openness in wages (and benefits) would be a good move. It would encourage salaries to go up faster, when there are market inefficiencies.
- collyw 13y ago
  I agree. Hiding salaries can only benefit the company, not the individual.
  - Crito 13y ago
    I agree that open salaries would be beneficial within an organization, or even perhaps across the industry, but I think that people should have the option to keep their salaries private to society in general. I do not need or want my family and many of my friends knowing how much I make. I deal with jealously and requests for personal "loans" enough as it is, and I live modestly (they all figure that I get paid a lot because of who I work for, but I would prefer that not be disambiguated). When asked by friends in my industry what I make, I openly tell them if I am close to them, but I guard that information much more closely with anybody that I know to be making much less than me in other industries.
- draugadrotten 13y ago
  > Openness is wages (and benefits) would be a good move. It would encourage salaries to go up faster, when there are market inefficiencies. Wages are public in Sweden (e.g. http://ratsit.se http://ratsit.se) and that doesn't make wages in Sweden high or raise faster. Salaries are, on average, much higher in neighbour Norway than in Sweden. So there are other - more important - factors at play than knowing the competitions salaries.
  - justinreeves 13y ago
    Wages are public in Norway too, aren't they?
steffan 13y ago
I think disallowing negotiation is ill-advised for several reasons. If an explicit salary negotiation is banned, people will find other things to negotiate instead. You will likely lose potential hires because you refuse to budge on salary. It is an inadvertent [negative] signal if, for example, the company is not even willing to add $5 to a salary. That would definitely be a deterrent to me. Finally, this potentially penalizes all of those who do negotiate salary to attempt to appease those who won't. It sends a message that (in this context) women are weaker and cannot possibly learn to negotiate. A far better solution is to change the culture to help all, men and women both, feel comfortable and informed when negotiating terms of a new position. Also worth stating: negotiation is a skill that helps throughout life, and rather then attempt to bury it in a specific context, it is far better to raise everyone up so that they can reap its rewards elsewhere.
joelrunyon 13y ago
I'd be interested in seeing if you stripped the gender data off this & gave everyone a negotiation-skill score & saw how salary discrepancies followed that distribution.
encoderer 13y ago
> I suspect nothing institutional will change though because it would ultimately cost companies money. They benefit too much from workers who negotiate poorly. Don't know if I agree with this. Maybe I can hire a somewhat experienced female engineer for $110k, but I know that sooner or later a recruiter or friend or GlassDoor query will tip her off that her peers are making 20% more. When that happens her morale will suffer, or she'll quit, or both. When I've hired candidates who truly did not know their own worth, I made them offers above their asking to be inline with market rates.
- Mz 13y ago
  Keep saying this and things like it. I read somewhere about a company that paid top dollar for its field. They had lower employee turnover than any other company in their industry. This saved the company scads of money in terms of hiring costs and had other benefits that are hard to readily quantify in terms of money but which do impact the bottom line (such as employees who had been there for years and years and had deep niche knowledge). The thing we need to do is inform folks that screwing women (or anyone) over comes back to bite you. It isn't advantage to "take advantage" of anyone. The real costs are non-obvious and may be somewhere down the line but they do exist. Have an(other) upvote. :-)
lugg 13y ago
I remember hearing similar stories around recruitment. Women, on average would apply for job adverts only if they met around 90% of the job description requirements. Where men would generally just take the shotgun approach and apply with around 50% of the requirements. Never really understood this "statistic" still dont. I do wonder if things have changed? I have a couple of girl friends in tech and have to do a fair bit of ego and confidence building before they work up enough balls to tell their bosses they are bored and need new responsibility and a raise to boot. Most guys I know just ask for more money in passing til it happens or they leave. Disclaimer, I dont know shit about the inner workings of the female mind all I have is anecdote and the up most respect for girls/women in tech or otherwise.
NextUserName 13y ago
I agree that his may be part of the difference, but here is my experience. There IS a gender gap, but with it a matching skills/abilities gap. I have experienced this first hand with dozens of women. A rare couple of them were top notch developers. They were ambitions and had a real passion for development and technology. So did about 20-25% of the men I worked with (vs less than 10% of the women). The other woman and men had base skills, but rarely showed ambition or passion to learn new thing and improve their skills, habits, tools, ETC. They were kind of just grinders. They never excelled or impressed. They weren't the kind who would tinker on the weekends with OSS or read development or tech blogs or books when they had free time. The top notch women were promoted and made similar salaries as the top notch men. Overall though, the women lagged behind the men percentage wise because of the reasons mentioned. I would be curious to know if others have seen this pattern. This is based on my 15 years in the software industry.
cameldrv 13y ago
The study is about salaries that are actually received though, not offers. The article says that there is a 6.6% gap over all occupations, which could definitely be due to women negotiating less. In Computer Science though, there is no gap. This might be due to women negotiating more than in other occupations or men negotiating less.

breischl 13y ago

I suspect it will not change because stopping negotiation is not actually achievable. Certainly you could disallow negotiation for direct, monetary compensation, but that would just push the negotiation into other areas. People would start negotiating for more vacation, more holidays, better benefits, a bigger office, a company car, an assistant, a private "education budget" (ie, pay me to take a vacation) or whatever else they can. The number of ways to compensate someone are limited only by imagination and can move much more quickly than regulation can catch up. A small example of this is when the US froze wages during World War 2, thus employers started offering perks like company-paid health insurance. That has since evolved into the mess we have now - that sure worked out great for everyone, didn't it?

phillmv 13y ago
Intra (small) company you could achieve this - "sorry, everyone gets the same deal: $x0k/year and y weeks of vacay and we only have one company benefits plan". Gets trickier once if you're immense and have very specific skillset requirements.
- TylerE 13y ago
  That seems like a really perverse incentive. Seems like you're asking people to do JUST enough to not get fired.

fossuser 13y ago

Exactly what I was thinking (I remember that previous HN comment too). I'd also suspect younger people negotiate less and people who are newer in the cycle of generational wealth (don't have someone helping them understand the process). Maybe since there are fewer women in engineering and friendships tend to generally be segregated by sex they don't have people to talk to about this kind of negotiation which further compounds the issue.

faet 13y ago

"Women are penalized more than men for negotiating," Babcock tells Alex Cohen. "People are less likely to like them; if they negotiate in a job interview, they are less likely to hire them. There are real social sanctions that occur when women initiate negotiations." http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12529237 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1252923...

Nursie 13y ago
You know that study is based on role-play, not reality, right?
- jrarredondo 13y ago
  But wouldn't the experiments at least indicate the possibility that they reflect reality?
  - Nursie 13y ago
    Definitely worth looking into, you certainly can't tell a lot from that npr article. Who did the role play? We're they a random assortment of psych students or people who had actually been on both sides of the table? Is there a good reason to think these classroom results hold up outside?
    - GFK_of_xmaspast 13y ago
      There has been no global warming since 1998.
- 001sky 13y ago
  you mean this? http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/08/11/More-assertive-women-judged-negatively/UPI-59241218498284/ http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2008/08/11/More-assertive-wom... or this? http://vault.hanover.edu/~altermattw/social/assets/w12papers/Sims.pdf http://vault.hanover.edu/~altermattw/social/assets/w12papers... or maybe this? http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/womencareerresearchbyoreilly.html http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/womencareerresearc...

ManFromUranus 13y ago

>Companies could fix this overnight by disallowing negotiation Fix what? What are they "fixing"? They seem to be fixing the problem of people being able to do better than default. Exiting times we live in...

_delirium 13y ago
Well, if a company both: 1) didn't negotiate wage offers; but 2) offered wages lower than people were willing to accept... they would end up with not enough employees. So it's not like they could just offer whatever they wanted. I'm not sure it will work, but it seems to be the wage-side proposal of what e.g. Saturn is trying to do with cars: just say, look, this is our price, take it or leave it. Rather than the traditional car (and salary) pricing model where the real price you're willing to agree to is hidden, and arrived at via a negotiation process. That often results in whoever's better at negotiating getting the better deal. Now if it's a negotiating job that might even be a good thing, because the better negotiators are more valuable to you. Or if it's a job where the skill you're looking for correlates highly with being good at negotiating. But if that's not the case, just making the final offer of what you're willing to pay up front, rather than starting lower and negotiating upwards, could be better idea. Then rather than negotiating per-candidate, you just adjust your offer policy until it's high enough to get the kind of candidates you want.
- nsxwolf 13y ago
  The lack of flexibility seems to be a real problem, even when the compensation package is competitive. What if you really want a person, but they turn down the offer because they just need a little more?
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    You could give them what they want, and extend the same offer to all current and future employees of the same skill level.
Crito 13y ago
It's the Harrison Bergeron method of pursuing equality. Instead of pulling up the disadvantaged, the advantaged are artificially limited. Prejudices and handicaps limiting the disadvantaged (in this case, prejudices against women who negotiate) are considered to be unchangeable facts of life; correcting those prejudices is not even considered. I think that instead of disallowing negotiation at all, we could look to university job courses (the ones that currently teach resume and interviewing skills) to teach negotiation skills and techniques. It would be something that any student could find valuable. Not only would it make young people entering the job market more comfortable with the idea of negotiation, but it would make people on the company side of things more familiar and comfortable with the notion of women negotiating (correcting that prejudice, instead of accepting/ignoring it as the Bergeron-solution does). If that proves unsuccessful, then less "personal" negotiation processes could be explored before the idea of negotiation was written off entirely. Perhaps sending a form letter with every offer letter saying something along the lines of "I'm sorry but I have to decline [position] because I've received a better offer of [$] from [company]" could work. Some sort of more forumalic approach to negotiation that reduces the human element (and therefore hopefully, the opportunity for human prejudices to manifest. I think that it is best to combat the prejudices however, not work around them).

Nursie 13y ago

And if I get a better offer from another workplace, but you think the extra 10k I'm asking for will be more than offset by the productivity gains I'm bringing to the table? You'll happily turn me down and get a worse team? Not really a world I want to live in.

_delirium 13y ago
It's a complex problem because there are feedback effects, but I think often that is a better decision for companies. Otherwise you end up with the situation where the people who are constantly threatening to leave get paid more, and the people who are spending their time doing actual work, rather than polishing their resumes and interviewing around, get paid less. This then incentivizes people who actually don't want to leave to go out and start collecting offers so they can argue better for a raise, which is a huge waste of their time and effort. Taking one decision in isolation, it might be better to pay someone $10k more to keep them from leaving. But it might be better structurally to come up with a different policy for allocating raises than "allocate them to the people who negotiate most hardball". Unless, maybe, it's a sales job, where being good at negotiating is precisely the skill you want to reward.
- Nursie 13y ago
  I kinda meant negotiating a starting salary rather than a raise. I tend to have found in the past that raises happen with relative frequency when you're good at what you do, and I'm not the type to threaten to leave - if it's got that far I've made my decision.
thedufer 13y ago
> you think the extra 10k I'm asking for will be more than offset by the productivity gains I'm bringing to the table Then your initial offer wasn't made in good faith. No-negotiation forces the person making the offer to actually consider what that hire would be worth, and offer accordingly.
- Nursie 13y ago

rch 13y ago

Some women might not press for raises (in some industries), but I have learned a ton about negotiation from female friends of mine. Like the director-level person at the last place I worked who started with literally twice the vacation days I had, just for example. And the family member who is simply always evaluating opportunities; she might take a first offer, but that is just a piece of data to her (i.e. if you're making it her problem to ask for more, then you're already at a disadvantage). And don't underestimate the effect of networking among talented professional women either. Another friend of mine casually mentioned she was uncertain about a new boss during a ski trip and she immediately had solid options in better environments, one of which she took. Other industries may lag, but it's fairly well established here that employers in technical and engineering fields are stuck with an increasingly difficult challenge of attracting and retaining talent. If you're not doing this proactively across the board already, then I'd love to know why.

tomsaffell 13y ago

When I started dating my (now) wife, she didn't negotiate her salary, and was at a company where other people did. I helped her figure out what to ask for, how to negotiate, and how to feel good about it. We built a spreadsheet to arm her with some data (e.g. salary compared to inflation). It worked. I hope by mentioning it that other people might do similarly.

ed209 13y ago
sounds great. Any chance of a quick how-to? I'm a male and I've never negotiated a salary either.
- pkamb 13y ago
  http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/01/23/salary-negotiation/
  - gohrt 13y ago
    I have wasted many hours of my life+productivity on HN, but this one URL (which I found on HN) has more than made up for it. Employees, take it to heart. Employers, you have been warned.
    - bjeanes 13y ago
      Indeed. That was very insightful. It's interesting to see the things I've arguably done well in past negotiations and those that I did poorly...
- fleitz 13y ago
  As with anything it's about practice, negotiation is an art. For an unskilled negotiator the best thing to know is your BATNA. A great rule of thumb is if people aren't saying no you didn't ask for enough. The first time I negotiated I shot way over, apparently even the lawyer didn't make that much, my reply was that the lawyers work usually wasn't scalable across multiple clients and that any code I made was a capital good that could be resold again and again generating value in the company for years, then I pulled out a sales spreadsheet showing how the code I wrote for various product lines brought additional revenue to the company and then multiplied by the average length on the contract. (Make a really big number and ask for a small part of it). Needless to say I was so successful in my negotiations that I was no longer allowed to have access to sales data. The best part is once you negotiate a good salary you can use it in future negotiations as an indication of skill to get even better salaries. (eg. Does the competitor want to steal the $50K per year coder, or the $250K per year coder?)

ap22213 13y ago

Openness in wages (and benefits) would be a good move. It would encourage salaries to go up faster, when there are market inefficiencies.

collyw 13y ago
I agree. Hiding salaries can only benefit the company, not the individual.
- Crito 13y ago
  I agree that open salaries would be beneficial within an organization, or even perhaps across the industry, but I think that people should have the option to keep their salaries private to society in general. I do not need or want my family and many of my friends knowing how much I make. I deal with jealously and requests for personal "loans" enough as it is, and I live modestly (they all figure that I get paid a lot because of who I work for, but I would prefer that not be disambiguated). When asked by friends in my industry what I make, I openly tell them if I am close to them, but I guard that information much more closely with anybody that I know to be making much less than me in other industries.
draugadrotten 13y ago
> Openness is wages (and benefits) would be a good move. It would encourage salaries to go up faster, when there are market inefficiencies. Wages are public in Sweden (e.g. http://ratsit.se http://ratsit.se) and that doesn't make wages in Sweden high or raise faster. Salaries are, on average, much higher in neighbour Norway than in Sweden. So there are other - more important - factors at play than knowing the competitions salaries.
- justinreeves 13y ago
  Wages are public in Norway too, aren't they?

steffan 13y ago

I think disallowing negotiation is ill-advised for several reasons. If an explicit salary negotiation is banned, people will find other things to negotiate instead. You will likely lose potential hires because you refuse to budge on salary. It is an inadvertent [negative] signal if, for example, the company is not even willing to add $5 to a salary. That would definitely be a deterrent to me. Finally, this potentially penalizes all of those who do negotiate salary to attempt to appease those who won't. It sends a message that (in this context) women are weaker and cannot possibly learn to negotiate. A far better solution is to change the culture to help all, men and women both, feel comfortable and informed when negotiating terms of a new position. Also worth stating: negotiation is a skill that helps throughout life, and rather then attempt to bury it in a specific context, it is far better to raise everyone up so that they can reap its rewards elsewhere.

joelrunyon 13y ago

I'd be interested in seeing if you stripped the gender data off this & gave everyone a negotiation-skill score & saw how salary discrepancies followed that distribution.

encoderer 13y ago

> I suspect nothing institutional will change though because it would ultimately cost companies money. They benefit too much from workers who negotiate poorly. Don't know if I agree with this. Maybe I can hire a somewhat experienced female engineer for $110k, but I know that sooner or later a recruiter or friend or GlassDoor query will tip her off that her peers are making 20% more. When that happens her morale will suffer, or she'll quit, or both. When I've hired candidates who truly did not know their own worth, I made them offers above their asking to be inline with market rates.

Mz 13y ago
Keep saying this and things like it. I read somewhere about a company that paid top dollar for its field. They had lower employee turnover than any other company in their industry. This saved the company scads of money in terms of hiring costs and had other benefits that are hard to readily quantify in terms of money but which do impact the bottom line (such as employees who had been there for years and years and had deep niche knowledge). The thing we need to do is inform folks that screwing women (or anyone) over comes back to bite you. It isn't advantage to "take advantage" of anyone. The real costs are non-obvious and may be somewhere down the line but they do exist. Have an(other) upvote. :-)

lugg 13y ago

I remember hearing similar stories around recruitment. Women, on average would apply for job adverts only if they met around 90% of the job description requirements. Where men would generally just take the shotgun approach and apply with around 50% of the requirements. Never really understood this "statistic" still dont. I do wonder if things have changed? I have a couple of girl friends in tech and have to do a fair bit of ego and confidence building before they work up enough balls to tell their bosses they are bored and need new responsibility and a raise to boot. Most guys I know just ask for more money in passing til it happens or they leave. Disclaimer, I dont know shit about the inner workings of the female mind all I have is anecdote and the up most respect for girls/women in tech or otherwise.

NextUserName 13y ago

I agree that his may be part of the difference, but here is my experience. There IS a gender gap, but with it a matching skills/abilities gap. I have experienced this first hand with dozens of women. A rare couple of them were top notch developers. They were ambitions and had a real passion for development and technology. So did about 20-25% of the men I worked with (vs less than 10% of the women). The other woman and men had base skills, but rarely showed ambition or passion to learn new thing and improve their skills, habits, tools, ETC. They were kind of just grinders. They never excelled or impressed. They weren't the kind who would tinker on the weekends with OSS or read development or tech blogs or books when they had free time. The top notch women were promoted and made similar salaries as the top notch men. Overall though, the women lagged behind the men percentage wise because of the reasons mentioned. I would be curious to know if others have seen this pattern. This is based on my 15 years in the software industry.

cameldrv 13y ago

The study is about salaries that are actually received though, not offers. The article says that there is a 6.6% gap over all occupations, which could definitely be due to women negotiating less. In Computer Science though, there is no gap. This might be due to women negotiating more than in other occupations or men negotiating less.