 The following is an excerpt from the book Money, A Memoir
by Liz Perle
Statistically speaking, women still earn only 78 percent of what men do, as noted earlier, and at our present glacial rate of progress it will take close to fifty years until we achieve parity. There are a host of reasons why this is true: Women stop working to take care of kids; women move from full- to part-time work in order to take care of family. But the plain truth is -- and it's not an easily quantifiable one -- women don't fight for money the way men do.
We simply don't ask to be paid what we're worth. Lisa Barron, a professor of organizational behavior at the University of California, Irvine, conducted a study where she held mock job interviews and made salary offers to both men and women. She offered everyone $61,000 for the same job and then looked at the responses by gender. By the end of the negotiations, the men in the study had settled on an average salary of $68,556; the women, $67,000. Seventy percent of the men felt they were entitled to earn more than anyone else, while a similar percentage of women said they should earn what others earned. But most revealing, 85 percent of the men said they knew what they were worth. A similar number of women responded that they weren't sure.
What makes this study even more remarkable is that all the participants were MBA students.
Women simply didn't feel comfortable thinking of themselves in monetary
terms, Barron concluded. When asked to comment on these findings,
Shelia Wellington, the president of Catalyst, an organization that
focuses on the concerns of women and careers, observed, "Women have
trouble tooting their own horns, shining a light on themselves. It
shows up around salary."
There's another distinctly female force at work that affects our
salaries. It goes back to our hardwiring. Since it is in the nature of
women to survive by keeping relationships and networks in working,
mutually supportive order, behaviors that might involve pitting one
person against another -- even in the name of making more money -- are
not going to feel right or comfortable. This is one of the reasons that
women rarely share salary information with one another. Doing so
establishes instant hierarchies, which, by their very nature, put us on
different planes from one another, thus separating us. We may not mind
the fact that different levels exist, but we don't want another woman
diminished by our success.
When we take the more affiliative, female perspective into
organizational environments where the compensation and promotion
systems were historically created for men, women wind up being
penalized. We play by different rules with different criteria for what
constitutes both success and acceptable behavior. Cutthroat behavior
can be an asset even in a company that says it values teamwork. Most
companies still operate by hierarchies, which are more natural
constructs for men than for women.
Deborah Tannen, a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and
author of the classic You Just Don't Understand, observes that gender
can affect our compensation at work. "When hiring an employee, the
employer knows that a man will take the job that pays him the most. But
a woman will often take a lower-paying job because she likes other
things about the job. This goes hand in hand with women having lower
salaries. If a company can lure a woman without offering her more money
than they have to, they certainly will."
Belinda, a senior executive at a big-city newspaper, was struck by the
difference she found in men's and women's responses to her initial
queries in her search for a new editor. "To a man (and I do mean that
literally)," she told me, "every man I called was willing to meet with
me to discuss the opening. They understood that even if they didn't
want to leave their current positions, it couldn't hurt to make a good
impression on a potential employer. I'm sure a few of them also thought
they could parlay a job offer into a raise or promotion in their
present positions."
Her experience with the women she approached couldn't have been more
different. "More than half the women I called begged off even an
introductory interview on the grounds that they just didn't feel they
should waste my time. But I also got the distinct impression that they
interpreted an interview as being disloyal to their current employers."
Since one key way to get promoted and increase salary involves
switching companies, these women are probably going to sacrifice
position or money. This points out a fundamental difference in what
women value. We are willing to sacrifice money for connection. But the
trade hurts us financially."
Copyright © 2006 Liz Perle
Liz Perle, who worked in book publishing as an editor and publisher for
more than twenty years, recently joined the nonprofit world, where she
is the editor in chief of Common Sense Media, the nation's leading
nonpartisan organization designed to help families make the best media
choices for their children. She is also the author of When Work Doesn't
Work Anymore. Perle lives in San Francisco with her husband and two
children.
For more information, please visit www.moneyamemoir.com.
Read DivaTribe's Review of Money, A Memoir, written by M. J. Chatfield, Ph. D.
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