It isn’t 23 cents less than every dollar earned by men in the same jobs, as the President dishonestly claimed in the State of the Union address, but women’s compensation is not yet equal to what men earn. Part of the reason is the choices women make regarding child-bearing and career timing; part is indeed bias. Some of it is also attributable to the fact that women are less aggressive and perhaps less skilled in negotiation. They often get lower salaries because, unlike their male counterparts, they don’t ask for higher ones.
Now comes “W,” who writes into an academic blog to show that women are penalized for daring to negotiate. She claims she was offered a tenure-track philosophy position at Nazareth College, a liberal arts school in Rochester, N.Y. She replied, she says, by emailing the selection committee:
“As you know, I am very enthusiastic about the possibility of coming to Nazareth. Granting some of the following provisions would make my decision easier: 1) An increase of my starting salary to $65,000, which is more in line with what assistant professors in philosophy have been getting in the last few years. 2) An official semester of maternity leave. 3) A pre-tenure sabbatical at some point during the bottom half of my tenure clock. 4) No more than three new class preps per year for the first three years. 5) A start date of academic year 2015 so I can complete my postdoc.
I know that some of these might be easier to grant than others. Let me know what you think.”
Let me pause here to point out that this is a terrible response, incompetent negotiation, and career self-sabotage. First, you do not negotiate in a potential employer-employee setting through e-mail. You talk. Then you can gauge how you are being received. She should have asked for an appointment.
Second, returning a job offer with five substantial counter-proposals will derail most potential employment opportunities unless the individual is a unique talent that the employer is determined to acquire no matter what the cost. The last three are particularly troublesome. Why a semester for maternity leave, if that isn’t standard? It is presumptuous to ask for special treatment before she has even begun work. A pre-tenure sabbatical is even more unreasonable, especially in addition to the semester off for maternity. Does she want to work, or not? Finally, the 2015 start date should have been noted in her initial application. This isn’t good faith negotiation; it is an attempted bait and switch.
Sure enough, the school allegedly replied by pulling its offer:
“Thank you for your email. The search committee discussed your provisions. They were also reviewed by the Dean and the VPAA. It was determined that on the whole these provisions indicate an interest in teaching at a research university and not at a college, like ours, that is both teaching and student centered. Thus, the institution has decided to withdraw its offer of employment to you.”
Pronouncing the withdrawal unreasonable and suggesting an inherent bias against women “leaning in,” the blog casually dismissed W’s e-mail as a benign request for standard “deal sweeteners.” What strange employment planet is The Philosophy Smoker on? If she was asking the college for a job and it didn’t recruit her, then she was negotiation from a position of weakness, and five requests were about four too many. If she was recruited by the college, as i assume she was, then it was foolish to announce that she was “enthusiastic” and yet ask for so many “sweeteners.” If I was running the search committee and had other good candidates, I’d ding her too. She looks like trouble to me, and she doesn’t seem to be as enthusiastic about the job as it currently exists as she represents.
But over at Slate, resident feminist Katy Waldman is incensed, calling the episode an example of the dangers of “initiating negotiations while female.” She quotes a female researcher whose diagnosis is that “If a man had sent that message. I suspect it might have been dismissed as a rookie mistake. Rescinding the offer rather than just refusing the requests is horrifying.”
In a word, baloney. Pulling the offer of a job from a candidate who negotiates like this and indicates through his or her communications that there is an interest in getting the most money for the least work possible isn’t “horrifying,” and it isn’t biased. It’s predictable and appropriate. As Dr. Helen Smith succinctly put it, the problem isn’t “negotiating while female,” it is negotiating while stupid.
Gender bias in the workplace exists, and as long as it exists, women will be handicapped by the “Fundamental Attribution Error,” what is also known as self-serving bias. Human beings tend to attribute positive outcomes to internal factors, and negative outcomes to external factors. For those who have experienced genuine discrimination, the Fundamental Attribution Error can make it difficult to identify mistakes and personal weaknesses, blaming failure on others, and as a result, never addressing the real problem.
Women can eliminate a large portion of the gender pay gap by improving their negotiation skills. That doesn’t just mean being willing to negotiate; it means learning to negotiate well. Blaming every failed parley on bias is neither wise or productive.
______________________________
Pointer: Instapundit
Sources: Pajama Media, Slate, The Philosophy Smoker
Ethics Alarms 
Perhaps there is sexism here, but we can’t know, can we? The woman’s ham-handed handling of the situation creates too much noise for this to be anything close to a controlled experiment. Could be sexism, or could be a PERSONALITY DISORDER.
I am fatigued by the entire debate. I have no doubt there are sexist hiring managers, and feeble women who don’t ask for what they want, and an array of other problems that cause *some* women to undersell themselves. But I find it hard to believe it’s endemic, when smart, educated women of my acquaintance (myself included, forgive the immodesty) made affirmative choices at some point to relax their schedules and trim ambitions because of a strong desire to be home more with children. After my older daughter was born, I went back to work three days a week (after making sure, during the previous years, I focused on building skills that would lend themselves to that kind of flexibility) and I was recruited to another firm, where I worked that schedule for ten years. I *wanted* to be at home more, but I’ve had a great work life, great balance. But I gather someone, somewhere would call me a victim.
We can’t learn anything by statistics that refuse to take choices like mine into account. And we can’t extrapolate anything from this woman. I have been a hiring manager, and if some young man sent me an email with a litany of demands, I wouldn’t hire him. It would be WEIRD. Man, woman, manbearpig, not good form.
Next example, please?
I am a woman, and have personal experience with being paid less than my more junior male counterprats. I am a poor personal negotiator. And I am a recruiter, who handles salary negotiations for candidates.
Yes, W asked for too much. You can’t demand a certain salary AND sabbatical AND maternity leave AND three class preps AND a 2015 start date. I think the salary and start date requests are reasonable. Sabbatical OR maternity leave are reasonable. Three class preps – no idea how much work is involved there, so I can’t comment on that. However, the tone was terrible, and as a recruiter, I would instantly see a future problem employee reflected in the demands, and I would rescind the offer too.
That having been said, my second maternity leave was only four weeks. I worked for a small company with no maternity leave policy, and had found a memo saying I would be terminated if I took longer. So I took all my accumulated sick and vacation time and we all survived but those first months back were terrible. A whole semester of maternity leave may be a lot but for a valued professor? Certainly the US in general needs to do better in this regard, and ivory tower universities seem like a good sector to lead the way.
Do men in that position get $65k? Do they get pre-tenure sabbatical? What perks were already in the initial offer?
It’s a shame that W didn’t handle this better. With a different, more tactful (could be argued more feminine) tone, she might have set a new standard and bumped that glass ceiling up just a little bit.
That’s just stupid… I thought everybody knew you had to get your foot in the door before you started negotiating.
Plus the more I read it, the more her letter comes off as passive-aggressive. If it just said “this is what I want” she might have gotten the same response, but the cutesy language about “oh, this might make it EASIER to decide, let me know” is grating to me- I know if I were a hiring manager that would raise a huge red flag about the kind of wheedling self-entitled but indirect employee I was in danger from.
“W” sounds like Charlie Brown’s Lucy VanPelt. I wonder if she ever broke the glass ceiling. Maybe we need to ban fussbudgets.
It seems like a reporter could follow up on a key point to this situation. We know the college and position in question. So who did they finally fill the position with?
– Man or woman?
– More or less qualified?
– At least try to interview the person about salary and perks granted. Although if I was the new professor in question I would deny all interview requests and keep out of this charlie foxtrot.
“More or less qualified?”
What exactly would be the qualifications measured?
Because a candidate the had the professionalism, assertiveness, and confidence to appear in person to negotiate compensation displays intangible qualities that could easily tip the scales even if the more definable-to-the-job qualifications don’t measure up to the lady who sent the email.
Not to dispute your main point, but the weird thing about the college’s response is that they say they’re withdrawing the offer because “on the whole these provisions indicate an interest in teaching at a research university and not at a college, like ours, that is both teaching and student centered.” That strikes me as a pretty fundamental matter that could easily have been cleared up during the search process and interviews before they made the offer. Bringing it up now sounds like an excuse, which it probably is. Maybe they found another candidate they liked better, or maybe they really were just put off by her negotiating tactics, or maybe they never thought to ask her about her interest in teaching (?), but whatever it is, I think they brought some of this on themselves.
…or they were just trying to be polite and professional.
“…these provisions indicate an interest in teaching at a research university….” comes off MUCH more civil than “…these provisions indicate a complete disinterest in doing the work for which we would be hiring you to do….”
–Dwayne
Ditto. I attended a research university, and there were professors who were allowed to limp along teaching one class a year and terrorizing all the students who got stuck in it with their utter lack of presentation, teaching, or people skills, because of their research and professional contributions. From what I know, research universities are also more able to give long-term leave, assuming the professor is able to schedule it for an appropriate down time in their work, while a teaching-focused university letting professors go for huge chunks of time or giving them guaranteed limits on how much teaching they have to do is problematic.
Of course, one might question how much contribution an associate philosophy prof is making, but that’s just my scientific rigor coming out 😀