49 Years After Kennedy Signed The Equal Pay Act, Women Still Earn 77 Cents To A Man’s Dollar

[Xithras]

69. I've hired many people over the years. Aggressiveness really does play a role.

With most professional jobs, wages are negotiated. I've hired MANY people over the years, and the process usually goes something like this: We offer a base pay and benefits package. A potential hire counters, if it's reasonable and the applicant is strong, we may accept, or we may counter again (less benefits in exchange for higher pay, for example). Either way, the pay is negotiated.

I've personally interviewed hundreds of people for dozens positions over the past 20 years in the software development field, including a 10 year stretch where I owned my own consulting firm and had up to 18 employees on payroll. In that time, I'd say that 75% of my prospective male hires ended up with salaries they'd negotiated. Less than a quarter simply took the starting offer. I've also had numerous applicants walk away from jobs AFTER they'd been offered because we couldn't meet their salary demands.

On the other hand, I can probably count the number of WOMEN who negotiated their salaries on my fingers, and I've NEVER had a woman walk away from a job offer over pay. With relatively few exceptions, women tend to take the starting offer without much discussion.

Raises are a similar deal. I've lost track of the number of times I've had a male employee walk into my office and say, "Hey, I like working here, but Company X is offering me $$$, and I'm going to have to resign if you can't match it." I've had male employees quit when I wouldn't offer the raise, and have handed out many raises to quality male workers in order to keep them on staff.

I've had exactly ONE woman do that while working for me. She was a brilliant app designer and got her raise. Last I heard, she's working for Google nowadays and is making about five times what I paid her...and she's worth every penny. I've never had another female employee, before or since, leverage a raise like that. The rest of the female employees under my supervision were content to simply accept their percentage-based annual post-evaluation raises.

I'm not even going to speculate as to the social or psychological reasons behind this, but it has been my experience that there is a very real difference between the way men and women approach compensation and how aggressive they are at pursuing additional compensation. In my own company, ALL hires received the same starting offers, and everyone was offered the same annual percentage based raises after their reviews. In spite of this, most of my male employees ended up making more than their female counterparts.

It really is a thorny problem, and there's no simple solution for it. You can't give the entire company a raise every time one employee demands one, and yet it's often important to respond to these raise demands to keep quality employees from leaving. This system favors those who are willing to demand more money, and more of those workers tend to be men.