Amber Cameron on Are YOU Selling Yourself Short on Salary Negotiations?

By Amber Cameron, Strategic Operations Manager – City of Palo Alto, CA 

“Is it too greedy?” my friend asks. “Absolutely not! You deserve to be paid your value, besides you need to buck this trend of women shying away from negotiating,” I advise. I’ve had this same conversation many times with female colleagues and friends. I’m often asked about the art of salary negotiations by friends because my colleagues know that one of my passions is researching the wage gap between men and women.

In my research on the topic of the gender wage gap, one of the contributing factors that I determined through this research is that women, more often than not, do not attempt to negotiate their incoming salary very well when accepting a new job. When asked if people negotiated after receiving a job offer, 57 percent of men said they did, while only 7 percent of women even tried to negotiate a higher salary (Babcock, Women Don’t Ask).

However, when my friend took my advice and sent an email requesting to negotiate on the initial salary offer, she received a very long response from the hiring manager. Paraphrased, the manager (and potential new boss) let her know that she probably couldn’t get Human Resources to sign off on a higher offer, and even if she could, she had reservations about my friend’s motivation in taking the job. This manager expressed that my friend should want the job because of the team, content, opportunity to learn, and impact on the community. She explicitly stated that, “If money is what is important to you then this is not the job you will be happy with.”

Yikes! No wonder women don’t want to negotiate – there’s a serious risk to relationships and reputation.

Experts on this topic let us know that women are seen differently when negotiating, and are judged more harshly than their male counterparts. (Perhaps this may change down the road when women and men are seen as serving equally as the breadwinner and the caretaker in a family). For now, I still think it’s worth the risk.

“Maybe I shouldn’t quibble over $3,000?” my friend continued.

I shared with her that it wasn’t just that $3,000. It’s how that $3,000 would affect her income five years from now.Future raises could be less, even the next job offer would likely be less.  Sometimes it may seem that the effort is not worth the potential damage over what could be seen as a small difference, but as Margaret Neale points out, that is the wrong way to look at it. That additional amount of money compounded over your whole career becomes significant. Three thousand dollars today that may have paid for a single vacation turns into a lower down payment for a house, less savings for your child’s college fund, or being able to retire near the beach.

To learn more about the art of female salary negotiating, the following resources will help prepare you for negotiating and how to be successful:

Stanford University Institute for Gender Research Great videos and tips on a variety of issues of women in the workplace

Negotiation Discussion Guide Research based advice on successfully negotiating

She Negotiates Worksheets, videos and all kinds of helpful resources for negotiating

Now get out there and negotiate a great deal when you receive that next job offer!