It is no surprise when a man and a woman apply for the same position, and the man gets the job, for him to make more money if the woman had gotten it? Not considering the profession, but why is that? Why are men and women not considered equally?
One theory was discussed in this Washington Post article called "Salary, Gender, and the Social Cost of Haggling by Shankar Vedantam. The beginning of the article does quite a bit of convincing with statistics that during the interview process, a man is significantly more likely to push for a higher salary than a woman. Babcock, the researcher referred to during this article, thinks this may partially explain the persistent gender gap in salaries as well as other disparities in how people rise to the top of organizations. "Women working full time earn about 77 percent of the salaries of men working full time," says Babcock. Again, that figure does not take differing professions and educations levels in account, but when those and other factors are considered, women who work full time and have never taken time off to have children earn about 11 percent less than men with equivalent education and experience. Could this potentially explain why some women are putting off having children longer and longer nowadays?
However, interestingly, the traditional explanation for the gender differences that Babcock found is that men are simply more aggressive than women, perhaps because of a combination of genetics and upbringing. The solution to gender disparities, this school of thought suggests, is to train women to be more assertive and to ask for more. However, a new set of experiments by Babcock and Hannah Riley Bowles, who studies the psychology of organizations at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, offers an entirely different explanation.
Their study, which was coauthored by Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai, found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women's reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice".
"What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not," Bowles said. "They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not."
This would be a very interesting conversation and I would love to hear your responses.
Full article can be found: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/07/29/AR2007072900827.html
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Surprisingly, I've seen a lot of women hired into the workplace in India at or above the level that men are hired. However, they typically get shortchanged when it's time for a promotion, or for performance reviews. That's when the "life cycle" of the employee is taken into consideration and the risk of attrition is discussed. In my experience, even though women are more steady at their jobs than men, and switch employers less often, the perception is that women are less stable because of family commitments. Because of this perception, faulty decisions are made regarding who to promote, the quantum of salary increase, and the level of responsibility between successive job roles. Many companies are actively working to get rid of this perception and have a more equitable environment for promotion and succession planning.
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