Yet another career for Shatner—coaching female job-seekers.
A recent study of 2500 job seekers indicated that men are far more likely to negotiate salary and benefits in job situations where it has no been stated that the salary is negotiable.
I am not surprised. Running non-profit organizations with limited resources, I always ended up with primarily female staffs because women would accept a lower offer than men with similar qualifications. This meant that the women got the jobs for salaries their male competition turned down. This, in turn, may have effected their salaries for a long time to come, in subsequent jobs. Is this bias?
Clearly not. The negotiations between an employer and potential employee are ethical and the conditions are known. A skilled negotiator (I am personally incompetent at negotiating my own fee; in ProEthics, my partner handles all of that) will get a better deal; a poor or reluctant negotiator will get terms more advantageous to the employer. It is not bias if the most aggressive and effective negotiators happen to be men.
Nonetheless, on at least two occasions this dichotomy led to ethical dilemmas. In one of them, I had two identical jobs to fill, and had been given a range by my superiors. I was to offer X, but I was authorized to go as high as X+. My duty to the organization was to get the best talent for the least resources. My top candidates were a man and a woman, with equivalent credentials. I offered the woman X. She accepted happily: it was more than she expected.
Deal.
I then offered the male candidate X. He refused. He argued for more. His counter offer was more than X, but less than X+, my limit. I agreed. He was happy.
Deal!
Now, however, I had two identical positions, with similar employees in every respect but salary. The man was getting more, not because I was biased, but because he was a better negotiator than his female colleague. Still, it seemed wrong to me, and dangerous: if the woman found out that she was being paid less for the same work, she would feel like she was being discriminated against. I know I would have.
So I went to my boss, and proposed that we raise her salary to the same level. He was incredulous, arguing:
- The male wasn’t negotiating for the two of them, just himself. Why should she benefit because he cut a better deal based on his superior business savvy?
- This was business, and negotiation is a business skill. He has it, she doesn’t. If she finds out about the discrepancy, tell her exactly why she had a lower salary.
- I would not be making such a request if the two employees were the same gender. (Maybe not then, but in another parallel situation later I did.)
- Our duty was to get as much done as possible with our limited resources. Rewarding an employee because another employee succeeded where she failed is an irresponsible misuse of resources.
I then went to the general counsel, and said that I thought the disparate salaries risked a lawsuit. “You did nothing wrong,” he said. “Just document it. Your boss is right.” It sure didn’t feel like he was right. If the situation remained as it was, I knew that:
1. I would have two employees doing the same work for different compensation, despite the same amount of experience, ability and time on the job.
2. I would be tempted, at review time, to find a justification to give the woman a better evaluation and a bigger raise even if she didn’t deserve it. I might even do so without consciously being aware that I was rigging the process, because I would have an existing bias against the respective salaries as they were.
3. I would feel as if my withholding the salary disparity from the female employee was an ongoing deception.
As things developed, the woman turned out to be an office star, and my boss was immediately impressed with her. A bit later I requested again that their salaries be equalized, and this time, he agreed. When I told her that I was giving her a raise, I also told her that she had cheated herself, in comparison to her colleague, by not negotiating effectively. She was very grateful for the advice, and said she would remember it in the future. Many years after she had left my organization to do other things, we had a chance meeting at a conference. She told me that she had taken the experience of her job with me and used it to spur her to improve her negotiation skills. She said that she was sure it had made a difference of “tens of thousands” of dollars in her employment contracts over the years.
This aspect of male-female salary disparity shows the dangers of attributing every disadvantage to outside malevolence. While identifying unjust biases in the workplace, women should not assume that their own shortcomings may not be part of the problem as well. Could a large part of the salary discrepancies between men and women be addressed by women learning to negotiate as zealously and effectively as their male counterparts? My guess is that it could. Women taking responsibility for remedying financial disparities by improving their own bargaining skills is both more productive and more ethical than placing all the burden on employers to compensate for a society-imposed behavioral gender difference. No, I don’t think employers are ethically obligated to negotiate with themselves when job-seekers, male or female, are poor negotiators and agree to worse terms than better haggling skills might have obtained. Nonetheless, the disparity in negotiation skills between the genders still causes an appearance of bias, and when that occurs, businesses can’t ignore it. That does not relieve women in the workplace of the duty to recognize that improving their own skills will be a boon to all concerned.
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Pointer: Today
Source: National Bureau of Economic Research
Graphic: Biddy Bytes
Ethics Alarms 
I am a women and I agree 100% it is not the employers duty,.
My mother learned, as did I the ropes of negotiations and knowing how to take care of ourselves in this world.
Women want equality, but more often then not women expect not to have learn these skill sets and /or to truly rely upon themselves.
Women have learned over time they do not have to negotiate for themselves, instead they want it given to them and they expect the government to step in and make it so.
I have seen this myself. At one point, I was talking with my colleagues in my department and I said that if a court looked at our hiring and salary history for the last 10 years, there is no way we could win a sex discrimination in hiring and salary lawsuit even though there hadn’t been any sex discrimination in hiring or salaries. It was all due to the negotiating differences between the male and female candidates. As you mentioned, it places me in an ethical dilemma. Is it ethical to tell candidates that they can (and should) negotiate their salaries? There is something odd about academics right out of graduate school (and yes, moreso, but not exclusively in female candidates) in that they think a university will offer them the best salary it is able to. This results in good candidates rejecting a low salary offer (under the impression that the school is unable to or unwilling to negotiate) rather than negotiating.
Cons: Telling candidates they can negotiate the salary may result in the institution paying more for an employee that they had to.
Pros:
(1) It may keep the institution from losing the best candidates (we have had several very good candidates turn us down because the offer was too low).
(2) It will make the administration realize that they need to pay more for quality candidates (candidates who turn down the offer for money often do not give that as the reason for fear of appearing greedy). Many people drop out of our job searches before the interview process when they ask about the salary.
(3) It will reduce turnover. People who take jobs at abnormally low salaries because it is their only option soon find better options and leave (and turnover in a small department is very detrimental).
Oh, Jack, Jack, Jack. Open your eyes.
Why is it that you looked at these two individuals and immediately jumped to Male/Female as the distinguishing factor? You were demonstrating confirmation bias there, and your employers at the time were right to tell you to knock it the Hell off. You cannot extrapolate characteristics of individuals with a small sample size (1 each!) to any sort of group at large; neither can you apply trends of a group down to any single individual with certainty.
But more importantly, there are thousands of differences between those two individuals that could have been a factor, which you discounted on sight because you saw one man and one woman.
What about:
Socio-economic background?
Parents divorced/still married?
Parents deceased/still living?
Family size?
Does either play video games?
Is either a musician?
Sexual orientation?
Have either had any major surgery?
Have either been the victim of a violent crime?
I could go on and on.
Bottom line: you’re dealing with two individual people. Full stop.
Anything else that you project onto that is 100% of your own creation.
–Dwayne
Yes, but so what? Are you arguing that if the reason wasn’t based in gender, then the apparent discrepancy wouldn’t matter? Your argument, I guarantee you, wouldn’t stop a court from saying that the difference in salary was evidence of racial discrimination? What is the gravamen of your comment, then? If it looks like discrimination, who cares whether the real distinction is gender or not?
I’m saying that when dealing with two individuals, and ONLY two individuals, you can’t just attribute the disparity in negotiation skills to male/female. That’s a huge leap, regardless of what the trends in groups of people are–even if they are measurable and demonstrable. It’s the classic causation versus correlation problem.
Mrs. Zechman is about six inches shorter than I am, which is precisely the difference in the average heights of Men and Women. But neither of us is of average height–she’s actually quite tall. I just happen to also be quite tall. Is she shorter than I am BECAUSE she’s a woman? Or is she shorter than I am because I just happen to be a tall man?
Now as to having two employees doing the substantially the same job for different pay, you have a point. There are ramifications to that, and a company may or may not be willing to accept them. But that issue has nothing to do with male/female.
And as to courts, this is precisely why so many laws do not apply until a business gets to a certain minimum size: because you can’t make a case for discrimination from a small amount of data. In my own company, I’m the only employee, so “we” are 100% white male. Yet *I* guarantee that no court would find my company guilty of racial discrimination.
–Dwayne
Who says any different? I wrote: “Running non-profit organizations with limited resources, I always ended up with primarily female staffs because women would accept a lower offer than men with similar qualifications. This meant that the women got the jobs for salaries their male competition turned down. This, in turn, may have effected their salaries for a long time to come, in subsequent jobs.” That’s a fact. It wasn’t just that one woman, but she was one who managed to cause a problem for me, because there was a male counterpart. I hired men and women for more than 20 years, and I began to notice that women generally took the first offer, while men wanted more–and often this led to me hiring a female as a less expensive way of getting the best bang for my buck. I said, faced with the research, that it didn’t surprise me, being consistent with my own observations. I have no idea why THAT woman didn’t negotiate well, and THAT was only one part of my experience leading to my conclusion.
But the research didn’t surprise me, and instinctively it seem accurate to me.