Linda has a great new book coming out this spring! YAY
We start the talk
Intro’ing Dr. Linda Babcock, our speaker.
– Intro to Dr. Babcock
Key take-aways from Dr. Babcock:
2003: Women Don’t Ask is published.
Linda talks about in her book and in this podcast she will cover:
- How much is cost women when we don’t ask/negotiate
- The research that documents why women don’t ask
- How they can learn to ask
How much we lose when we don’t negotiate.
Out of undergrad, if women do not negotiate their starting salary, women can lose about $568,000 over the course of her career in lost income, because her base salary is lower than it might have been. That’s a one-time negotiation at the beginning of your career.
The number is a lot higher if you think of someone entering with a graduate degree, say a Masters of Science or Masters of Business Administration. The lost income over the course of a woman’s career could be as much as $1,600,000.
This is money that people, men and women, leave on the table when they don’t negotiate their starting salary. These numbers are truly astounding. Of course, these numbers would be even bigger if we consider negotiating for raises.
Linda tells us about how she got interested in this topic. This is the case of women graduate students not getting as choice assignments or pay as their male counterparts.
Linda is the manager of the PhD students.
Three graduate female students went in to talk to Linda, and they wanted to know why all the male graduate students had been assigned to teach courses, and they were not given the same opportunities. The female students had been assigned as teaching assistants, not given classes to teach. There is a big status difference between given a course to teach and being a teaching assistant, as well as a big income difference. They didn’t think it was fair, and neither did Linda.
When Linda talked to the Dean of her school, Mark Wessel, he looked over the list of students that had requested teaching courses, and realized that the students that had asked to teach were all men. None of the women had come to ask to teach. Turns out, the women students thought that if there were teaching opportunities, some one would have sent around an email, giving information on how to volunteer for teaching assignments. The women students were waiting for an opportunity to be offered to them.
The male students, as a result, got better positions after graduating. Men tend to, in Linda’s research, ask more than women.
Linda mentions some of her studies, in and out of the laboratory.
Men negotiate about three times as much as women.
It’s a broad phenomenon, and it’s not just about money or your salary. Women are less likely to negotiate lots of things in your organization, like asking directly for a promotion, or asking for a type of experience in your organization that will put you in line for your next promotion. It’s a lot of little things that help men rise up the corporate ladder a little faster than women, because their out there, negotiating more.
Linda talks about her “Boggle” Negotiating Experiment
Negotiating for Pay
8x times as many men negotiated their pay, versus women.
Linda talks about her surveying new Carnegie Mellon grads.
Who negotiated their new jobs?
12.5% women negotiated their new salaries after graduation.
51.5% of men negotiated new salaries after graduation.
4 times as many men negotiated, versus their female classmates.
Why are women not negotiating?
1. Socialization
People treat children differently, based on their gender. Mentions studies of infants and how parents describe their children. Boys are sturdy, girls are weaker, fragile. Researchers cannot find objective difference. We have an idea of how little girls and boys are supposed to be, and we are seeing them through those lenses, and we treat them differently.
If you look at Saturday morning cartoons, 82% of cartoon main characters are male. Only 18% of characters are female. Female characters are generally secondary characters. So what children are learning through watching TV is that boys are out having adventures, and girls are kind of secondary.
Socialization also happens through assignment of chores. Girls are given chores that are every-day sorts of activities (tidying, setting the table, folding clothes, etc.) and give boys chores like wash the car, shovel the snow. Because girls chores are very frequent, they often don’t get paid for their chores. Boys chores are more likely to be rewarded with money, whereas little girls learn that work is for love and family, and shouldn’t be expected to be paid.
Boys are learning they are the major characters in life, they get paid what their worth, and they are more assertive, and rewarded for that. Girls grow up learning they are secondary creatures, that they should do work for love.
Boys are rewarded for assertiveness, whereas women are called and considered derogatory things (bitch, ice queen, etc) if they are perceived of as assertive or aggressive.
“2. Negative Backlash” Study on videotaping of men and women negotiating (or not negotiating) their salaries.
(Respondents) People really liked the woman when she did not negotiate, but did not like her at all when she did negotiate. For men, there was virtually no difference (negotiation or not).
Women understand that this commonly happens, and so often hold back when negotiating jobs or similar scenarios, where they fear a potential negative backlash. That’s one reason women don’t negotiate.
3. Access to networks.
Men spend more time networking with the people that they work with. Networking in a formal way, at work, or in an informal way – golf, going to clubs together, etc. It might seem like fun and games, but at the same time they are learning a lot of information about how to advance in an organization. A lot of information of how you get from point A to point B, and a lot of this information is about what you can negotiate. How can I get to this next level? A guy will learn that it’s about asking for an opportunity, or a certain type of experience or training that will put you in line for the next promotion or position. Women are often excluded from these formal and informal networks.
These three elements are what leads to women not asking: socialization (how we treat our kids), fear of Negative Backlash, and access to networks.
Next Linda talks about how to overcome these barriers, and how to learn how to use negotiation more effectively.
Linda pauses for questions. She mentions resources, will pass along via the list.
Gender and the employer. Linda has found that both men and women discriminate against a women more harshly when the woman negotiates versus if she does not. It’s subtle and we may not even be aware of it.
Discussion of race, class? Does this break down by any segments?
The gender gap in negotiating, is similar along age and class status. Don’t have enough race data to make any conclusions, but hope to find it and hope to also spur international studies.
How do we fix it?
Linda talks about Six Steps to Learning to Ask.
There are never signs to tell us when to negotiation. Some are easy – like buying a house, or a car. You negotiated these costs. In all other situations, we have to decide for ourselves, if this is an opportunity to negotiate. You have to see all possibilities in life as negotiable. You should say “Yes, everything is negotiable, unless it is clearly not.” (i.e. cost of gas) Can negotiate all sorts of things, oil changes, coupons for restaurants, clothing. Think about the possibilities in life. Lots of opportunities can be negotiated, and you should go and try.
2. Making a Plan
You want to make a plan when negotiating. Preparation is key.
Establish an appropriate target or goal. Women tend to set lower goals. We have to be careful that we aren’t underselling ourselves. It’s important to understand what the market value is of your skills and abilities. Benchmark you skills and abilities, relative to your field, and it will help you establish targets and goals. Gather as much information as you can. Setting targets is key. Also know what issues are of interest to the other party you are negotiating with, so you can assuage their fears and get them on your side.
3. Managing Emotions
Positive emotions are really effective and contagious. And helpful to you when negotiating, to diffuse tension. Negative emotions are also similarly contagious, but can damage your relationship with the person you’re negotiating with.
The best way to manage your emotions is to rollplay as a method of practice. The reason this is effective in controlling emotions is that emotions effect us the most when they surprise us, and it’s better from a negotiating standpoint to block the emotion, rather than just dealing with it. In a rollplay, you can anticipate and deal with the harshest of outcomes, so that you experience the emotion in the rollplay, and it doesn’t happen to you or effect you when the actual negotiation is going on.
Also don’t be afraid to take a break from the negotiation to restore equilibrium, so you can attack the negotiation in a constructive way.
4. Negotiating for Yourself like you would for Others
Linda’s research shows that women are terrific negotiators… for other people. Great at negotiating for their family, their colleagues or organizations, or the causes they believe in, all of those things, when it concerns some thing or one. But when we negotiate for ourselves, is when the socialization kicks in and we revert to not negotiating. Try to think about “if this was my best friend’s negotiation, how would I feel?” You might feel more positively about it, and we need to change those emotions so we feel them for ourselves.
5. Paying attention to how you ask.
This is about reframing language.
Very direct and assertive language is difficult for women. Linda suggests using cooperative tactics, rather than competitive approaches. Competitive (I win, you lose) is often less effective. Cooperative tactics are more about problem solving, rather than a war. They are very effective at helping women getting what they want, without bumping up against certain norms that cause the negative backlash.
6. Getting yourself psyched up
Walk in to a negotiation with a very upbeat attitude. Some people exercise, listen to music, wear a great suit – whatever it is, get into the right, positive frame of mind.
Cooperative tactics
Style and how you approach negotiations.
Ex. You have a job, and you get another offer from another employer. How do I negotiate with my current job to get what I want and not have to quit my current job.
There are a couple of ways to do this.
Scenario #1: You can go and plainly say: I want you to know I’ve received this other offer, and it’s for a lot more money. I’m going to take it unless you can match it.
That is a threatening framing. Very competitive and wouldn’t recommend anyone use it.
Scenario #2: Treat it as a problem-solving event for you and your employer. “I’ve gotten an offer from another organization, and it would pay a lot more money, but I really wanted to talk to you about it, because I’d really like to find a way to stay. I like my job here. Is there a way we can work this out? Can you match it so I can stay?” We’re in the together, how can we make this possibility work?
It’s more cooperative rather than a threat.
When you make it a problem solving situation rather than a competitive situation, it defused the negative emotion, and involves the other person.
Answers questions on how to set appropriate targets.
Leave your ego out of it, and not about your need, and more about what the market will pay for your skills and abilities. Look at salary.com, payscale.com, and different associations and what the appropriate salary is. Also geographic and other considerations should be taken in to consideration. And use your network to see what others are paid. Knowledge is power!
Talk to your network, talk directly to your employer if you have a strong relationship with your boss. Frame it as an information gathering exercise.
Mentorship is really helpful in any organization. What is the process for being promoted and similar ways to help figure out how to advance. A mentor can help you gather that information.
Other books and authors recommended by Linda:
Negotiation Genius, by two profs at Harvard.
Talks about good cooperative approaches. It is corporate-oriented but a good intro to negotiation.
Classic: Getting to Yes
Outlines the approach to “win-win” scenarios.
Get Paid What you’re Worth
Robin Pinkly
Negotiating Salary
Ask for it
By Linda Babcock, out this February 2008
How do you identify what you want, how do gather information, and avoid backlash.
Linda’s other organizations:
Progress (Program for Research and Outreach on Gender Equity in Society)
The mission of PROGRESS is:
To pursue gender equity and foster positive societal change for all women and girls through education, partnerships, and research.
There is also a Girl Scout badge on negotiation, called “Win-Win” for girls 8-10 years old.
Other websites:
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/progress/
More about Linda:
http://www.heinz.cmu.edu/bio%5Cfaculty/lb2k.html
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Are more men engaged in politics online than women, and if so, why? These aren’t just idle questions.
As we all know, for the first time in the nation’s history, a woman, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, has a real shot at becoming president. She is banking on the idea that women will come out for her in droves. And like most of this year’s presidential candidates, she’s putting time and money into an Internet strategy.
But those two things aren’t necessarily connected. That is, she’s going after women in several ways (house parties, for example). But her Internet strategy is more about having an aggressive, up-to-the-minute, informative Web site, building a presence on YouTube and MySpace, and keeping a hand in the comments sections of mainstream political blogs.
We know that women slightly outnumber men online. But at least anecdotally, it seems as if more men are on the political blogs, writing specifically about politics, reading about politics and putting in their two cents in the comments sections. Did you notice how many more men compared to women submitted videos for the Democratic YouTube debate in July? The pool of videos for the upcoming Republican YouTube debate is similarly stocked with more men.
If the campaigns are trying to reach women-- and they all should be, since more women than men vote and they could determine who gets elected -- are they looking for them in the right ways, in the right places?
I asked our readers if they thought more men were engaged online in politics than women, and if so, why.
Many said yes, guessing that perhaps twice as many men as women, maybe even three times as many men are involved, at least on the traditional politics-oriented sites.
As for why, readers offered lots of reasons, including this newsflash: women are just too busy, often with the household chores that men choose to ignore in favor of going on the computer.
I especially liked this post from Joyce, who described herself as someone who thinks seriously about politics, reads editorials and watches the televised debates:
“More men spend time on computers arguing when there is no football or other organized mayhem to watch on T.V. while the ‘little woman’ is looking after the children, preparing dinner, getting her clothes ready to go to work tomorrow, etc.”
She added: “Women realize posting doesn’t change a thing, so we spend our time more usefully.” Besides, she said of posting, “nobody really bothers to read to the bottom of the posts” and the posts are often redundant.
(Don’t despair, Joyce; we’re reading.)
Other thoughts from readers:
* For men, elections are like sports and they love the horse race. C Ray (gender unknown) put it this way: “I think men are more interested in the competitive nature of the election. It’s like a sport — who will win or lose, who has the best strategy, who is on offense, who is on defense? Men are interested more in the minutiae of the game.” He/she added: “I think women could care less and are more focused on the big picture.”
* Men “like to show off more, like to force quasi-muscular opinions more on the unseen multitudes that they think are eager to hear them, want recognition more,” wrote another reader.
* Many readers note, sadly, that if a woman makes her opinion known, she opens herself up to abuse, thanks to the anonymity and rancor of the blogosphere. One poster who said she is a woman said she posts under fake male names because women “are routinely attacked.” (Along these lines, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and a blogger, reminded us about the recent coming out of Digby, a highly respected progressive political blogger whom many had assumed was a man but turned out to be a woman.)
* Abe asked this: “Is it women who aren’t interested in politics or politics that isn’t interested in women?”
* Men and women communicate differently. Sarah writes: “This is a generalization, of course, but much has been written about how men tend toward more problem-solving and direct point-to-point repartee whereas women like to sit down and discuss more details and come to consensus.”
* Do yourself a favor and take a look at post #34 (so good it was duplicated as #41) from “a woman on the inside.” She says that men are not online more than women, they are just louder and more likely link to one another “and build up an echo chamber that reinforces their dominance.” Women tend to work more behind the scenes, she says, and she urges us “to look beyond the incestuous political blogosphere” to local blogs and the so-called mommy blogs. She refers to a number of sites with female voices.
“Woman on the inside” is exactly right. When we started out trying to measure the degree to which women were visible in online politics, we were looking in the wrong places.
For further guidance, I contacted a couple of noted female bloggers _ Morra Aarons, the political director for blogher.com, and Emily McKhann, a highly respected blogger who is a co-founder of The Motherhood and who was recently credentialed to cover former President Bill Clinton’s Global Climate Initiative.
They echoed what some of our posters said _ mainly that women were re-defining politics online, away from conventional male-dominated sites that were obsessed with the horse race and toward sites that wove politics into the fabric of women’s lives. This is an important distinction, and you have to wonder if the campaigns, most of whose Internet strategies are driven by men, get it.
“Campaigns approach women bloggers on the soft issues, like health care,” Ms. Aarons said. “Let them bring the foreign policy debate to the big mommy blogs, which get tons of traffic.”
Standard political blogs are “in-the-weeds stuff, for political junkies,” she said. Women are more comfortable when they can share mutual interests, which is why parenting networks and mommy blogs are so popular. Many are filled with politics, just not in the same old way.
For Ms. Aarons, this raises an age-old question: Can women be taken seriously as analysts if they are not part of the boys’ club? If their own club is separate, can it be equal? Blogher.com held a conference this summer with guest speaker Elizabeth Edwards, a revered figure in the blogosphere. But it drew almost no attention from the mainstream media, much of which later gathered for the better known (male-dominated) YearlyKos convention (which also attracted almost all the Democratic candidates).
For Ms. McKhann, what is happening in the bifurcated blogosphere simply underscores the old saw, “the personal is the political.” The smartest candidates, she said, are those who take seriously the “kitchen-table politics” that “unfold every day on the mom blogs and Web sites.”
“If we’re talking about car pool, what’s for dinner and the war in Iraq all in the same breath, it’s still politics on the blogs and across the Web,” she wrote by e-mail.
Obviously this topic is rich. We have to leave it for now, but you can continue to add your thoughts here. Tell us the sites where you pick up political chatter, even _ especially _ if that site is not devoted to such. When we next appear in this space in a couple of weeks, we’ll look at this subject from the perspective of some of the presidential campaigns.
Thanks for taking time to write. Now, back to the laundry.
What do you think?
An excerpt:
Whateverlife just sort of happened, another accidental Web business. Originally, Ashley created the site in late 2004 when she was 14 as a way to show off her design work. "I was the dorky girl who was into HTML," she says. It attracted zero interest beyond her circle of friends until she figured out how to customize MySpace pages. So many classmates asked her to design theirs that she began posting layouts on her site daily, several at first, then dozens.]]>
...why more men seemed to be involved in politics online than women. I wondered if you 1) agreed with that and 2) why or why not.
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A spokesman for Verizon said the decision turned on the subject matter of the messages and not on Naral’s position on abortion. “Our internal policy is in fact neutral on the position,” the spokesman, Jeffrey Nelson, said. “It is the topic itself” — abortion — “that has been on our list.”
Mr. Nelson suggested that Verizon may be rethinking its position. “As text messaging and multimedia services become more and more mainstream,” he said, “we are continuing to review our content standards.” The review will be made, he said, “with an eye toward making more information available across ideological and political views.”
Naral provided an example of a recent text message that it had sent to supporters: “End Bush’s global gag rule against birth control for world’s poorest women! Call Congress. (202) 224-3121. Thnx! Naral Text4Choice.”
This sums it up best:
Timothy Wu, a law professor at Columbia, said it was possible to find analogies to Verizon’s decision abroad. “Another entity that controls mass text messages is the Chinese government,” Professor Wu said.
UPDATE:
]]>Saying it had the right to block "controversial or unsavory" text messages, Verizon Wireless last week rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon's mobile network available for a text-message program.
But the company reversed course this morning, saying it had made a mistake.
She says:
Networking is about creating an extended family. It's about developing connections, caring about people, increasing the size of your "tribe." Most of all, networking is not the awkward social ritual many of us think it is--networking is actually FUN!
Go read it, you'll be glad you did.
]]>A: You've studied the cultures of Friendster and MySpace. Do you feel that these sites can change the dynamics of how the sexes interact?
db: Again, not really, for the same reasons as I've stated earlier. The important thing to remember with social network sites is that they aren't about the virtual, they are about modeling offline connections and maintaining them. Gender dynamics are culturally embedded and that means that they seep into the online world.
That said, I think that they open up opportunities for conversation. I remember hearing of a discussion on Flickr between self-identified feminist Americans and women from the United Arab Emirates. The American women were irritated with the UAE women's desire to restrict images of women's tummies and breasts as "pornographic." The American women accused the UAE women of being victims of masculine oppression. The UAE women shot back with something along the lines of, "Why do you need to validate yourself by making yourself available for male objectification?" I found this discussion eye-opening. From the UAE women's perspective, modesty was feminine strength, a desire to be valued for something other than male gaze.
I built a private online community for V-Day organizers. We had so many amazing discussions about feminism, sexuality, identity, empowerment, etc. I think that community spaces that gather people around a shared interest in these issues are far more productive than social network sites, simply because social network sites are meant to support pre-existing networks while community sites are more about helping people gather around an interest.
The whole thing is worth a read - danah discusses the inherent sexism in video games, online communities and challeneges women face in the tech sector.
(I have no idea why danah boyd is never capitalized properly, but I'm going with it...)
]]>Bring on the tech gear, but don't make it girly: That's what women want, according to a survey released today.
Just 9 percent of the fair sex want products that "look feminine," like a pink Playstation or Hello Kitty keyboards. The remaining 91 percent seek something sleek and sophisticated, more boardroom than teenage bedroom. The data comes from a study, done by the advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, of 750 British women age 24 to 45.
The agency says its study indicates it's time for tech companies to go beyond the pink ghetto.
"There are clearly some smart, forward-thinking marketers in the industry, but for some reason, when it comes to targeting women, things haven't moved on," said Belinda Parmar, planning director at Saatchi. "Most women feel cheated when they walk into stores or see ads with baby-pink, diamante-encrusted products."
But that doesn't discourage "lady geeks," as the study dubbed them, from getting the gear. These "empowered" women, 37 percent of the total, owned an average of six devices, including a digital camera, desktop or laptop, multimedia mobile phone, MP3 player, digital TV and handheld game console. Overall, U.K. women own only slightly fewer tech items (11 percent) than men.
"What's fascinating to me about this research is the index of just how much technology women own," said Dr. Genevieve Bell, resident anthropologist at Intel. "Yet we still have these ideas about women and technology that are clearly out of step with the realities of the marketplace."