Posted By: ivillagecares on
Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, iVillage Cares Advisory Board Member and President of Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT)
In May, the Supreme Court placed limits on an employee's ability to sue for pay discrimination. The controversial ruling establishes a 180-day period during which employees can file lawsuits alleging pay discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion or national origin. Because pay discrimination is often difficult to identify immediately, this time limitation seriously hampers an employee's ability to have such situations remedied.
Just because the Supreme Court has struck down this remedy doesn't mean that we have to accept pay discrimination as a fact of life. It's important that we understand why inequities exist and how they occur. And it's also important that each of us take steps, like writing our Congressman and working with our Human Resources department, to make any sort of discrimination unacceptable.
There are many reasons that pay inequity exists, but studies show that some of them are behavioral. Women are less likely than men to ask for more money during a salary negotiation, believing they will be paid a wage comparable to their male counterparts with similar education and experience. Linda Babcock, an economics professor at Carnegie Mellon University, has demonstrated these disparities and how they occur.1 In her social experiments, Babcock found a number of differences between men and women in negotiation.
- In one experiment where the subjects were told the fee for their time and then offered the base amount, eight times more men than women sought more money.
- When the experiment was re-run and the participants were told that the fee was negotiable, 83 percent of the men -- compared to 58 percent of the women -- asked for more money.
- In another study, Babcock queried graduate students about their job offers and whether they had taken the initial offer or negotiated. 51 percent of the male students, compared to 12.5 percent of the female students tried to negotiate. Those that did negotiate were compensated an average of 7.4 percent higher than their peers who did not negotiate.
This salary negotiation impacts not just the first job, but also those down the road. According to the Washington Post, if a 22-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman are offered $25,000 for their first job and one of them negotiates the amount up to $30,000, then over the next 28 years, the negotiator would make $361,171 more.
However for women, the social risks of engaging in salary negotiation may outweigh the economic benefits. Another study, conducted by Babcock, Carnegie Mellon's Lei Lai, and Harvard's Hannah Riley Bowles, demonstrates how men and women who negotiate are perceived.2
- Both men and women are more likely to subtly penalize women who negotiate and believe that women who ask for more money are "less nice."
- Men tend to punish women who negotiate but were less likely to penalize men; women tended to penalize both men and women, and preferred applicants who did not ask for more.
- Women are less likely than men to negotiate when they thought they would be dealing with a man, but men and women behaved similarly when they thought a woman would be making the final decision
- The negative effect for women is more than twice as large as it is for men.
Companies shouldn't have to wait for their employees to bring inequities to their attention. Internal policies and tools should be put in place to identify and rectify such situations. In the five years that Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT) has been conducting the PAR Initiative, we have shared best practices related to pay equity and honored companies in the cable telecommunications industry for their growth and diligence in this area. As a result, the percentage of participating companies with no formal pay equity policy has decreased from 78.57% in 2003 to 7.14% in 2006. Many of these companies conduct quarterly pay equity surveys to identify any disparities and also have specific budgets set aside to correct problems if they are identified so that departmental operating budgets aren't hampered by existing inequities. If you're interested in learning more about WICT's work in this area, visit our PAR Initiative website.
There are things that we can all be doing to ensure that this Supreme Court decision doesn't cause backward progress in the area of equal pay.
- Write to your Senators and let them know that you want them to pass the Fair Pay Restoration Act passed by their colleagues in the House of Representatives. Let your Representative know what you think of their vote. You can do this, and track the progress of this legislation on the NOW Website.
- Make sure that your company has a pay equity policy in place by asking your Human Resources department to see it and explain how it's administered. If they just have the basic EEOC statement, give them some ideas on how they might improve it. The PAR Initiative website I mentioned above is a great place to get some ideas on innovative ways companies in my industry are addressing this problem.
- And when it's time to ask for a promotion or start a new job, don't be afraid to ask for a higher salary; you know the guy across the hall has already taken his check to the bank.
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1: Vendentam, Shankar. "Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling." The Washington Post 30 July 2007. p A07.
2: Ibid.
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