Effectively negotiating away the Gender Pay Gap.

Many studies have shown that women don't tend to negotiate staring salaries, raises and promotions as much or as well as men do, and that this gap produces cumulative salary differences that can cost women well into six figures after just a few decades of work. One woman's seminars training women to negotiate effectively are now reaching thousands, with positive results. Her advice?

"Women learn never to name a salary figure first, and to provide a range, not a number, if they’re pressed about it. They are coached not to offer up a figure from their last job, unless explicitly asked. The use of terms like “initial offer” — it’s not final! — is pounded into them. And, perhaps most important, they learn never, ever, to say yes to an offer immediately." To avoid the unique risks that women face of being branded as pushy or aggressive, she counsels them to smile, and to be warm and friendly while being firm.

Want to make a difference in 2013? Make sure your friends and family get this training. They will thank you for their greater self esteem and pay checks. Follow on Twitter: @UpsideDownBook

The End of Men?

David Brooks, conservative columnist at The New York Times, praises Hanna Rosin’s new book. The End of Men? Hardly. Brooks and Rosin’s selective exclusion of obvious data is suspicious, and risks encouraging those who say we live in a gender blind society. Some say women are doing fine, it is boys who need help, so we can abandon efforts to help women succeed.

Looking first at the data cited by Brooks or Rosin: “Twelve out of the 15 fastest-growing professions are dominated by women.” Those jobs are in service sectors and health care, and are not generally high paying. Men “stink” at communicating “smoothly”? That would explain why men constitute 83% of Congress and 77% of state legislatures – the later percentage having stayed flat for the past dozen years. Women are “pioneering” hook up culture? Even a cursory look at popular culture strongly suggests that men still regard women as sex objects and that young women still regard sex primarily as a vehicle to please men.

Looking at some key data from my recent book Upside Down: The Paradoxes of Gender in the New Century (www.upsidedownbook.NET), shows that that since the dawn of the new century women’s progress has stalled. Women’s median income as percentage of men’s? Flat The pay gap between men and women with four-year degrees? Increased. Women’s percentage of directors of large corporations and of partners in large law firms? Flat. The extent of occupational gender segregation in various professions dominated by one gender? Unchanged. Women’s representation in statewide elective offices and as mayors of large and medium sized cities? Down.

Are women more adaptable than men? Perhaps, but as the subordinate gender in a patriarchal world, of course they have to be to make any progress at all. But a wealth of data shows that women in developed nations are less happy than they were forty years ago, both absolutely and compared to men. We need to change that.

The Flat Decade

Another in a series of paradoxes:
Decades ago, in principal at least, we committed to equal pay for women for equal work and equal representation in leadership positions. But U.S. women’s progress toward equality so far in the new century can be called the flat decade. It’s as if feminism hit a societal glass ceiling.

The average gender pay gap for workers without a four-year college degree has slightly narrowed since the mid-1990s, in part due to effects of the Great Recession that began in 2007 described below. Surprisingly, the gap has widened for those with degrees. For example, a study of doctors’ salaries in New York State in first jobs after residency eliminated the effects of inflation, hours worked, practice settings, and specialty choices. It found a $3,600 annual gap between men and women in 1999, but a much larger gap of $16,819 in 2008.

Although the aggregate effect of these opposite trends narrowed the average gender pay gap across all occupations by a few percentage points in the first decade of the new century, the median annual gender pay gap for full time workers reduced by less than one percentage point, despite much greater progress in earlier decades. The median is the income of that man or woman whose income is greater than the lowest half of those workers in his or her respective gender, and also less than the higher half. (Given that a relatively small number of those at the top of the income ladder earn very high wages, the average income is higher than the median.) One explanation for the stagnation in the median gap is that even though women made up fifty percent of the total workforce in 2010, they remained stuck at sixty percent of those in low wage jobs.

One might see some progress in the fact that while women lost the most jobs in the recession of 2001, men held more than three-quarters of the jobs lost during the Great Recession. But a New York Times’ analysis gave feminists little cause for comfort. First, it said the Great Recession hit male dominated industries such as finance and construction the hardest. The Times’ second explanation went straight to the heart of the earnings paradox: because of the wage disparity between men and women, women were in greater demand in the Great Recession because they are willing to work for less than similarly qualified men. Public sector layoffs caused by the recession subsequently increased women’s overall unemployment even as private sector jobs began to recover, because women hold a large majority of public sector jobs. In addition, opposite trends in unemployment rates by gender combined with public sector pay cuts and freezes exacerbated the wage gap rather than narrowed it.


In 2010, a General Accountability Office study examining the most recent data found that between 2000 and 2007 the percentage of women managers grew by only one percent. And growth at the top was flat in the first decade of the new century. In 2002, fewer than sixteen percent of corporate officers in Fortune 500 companies were women, and women held just ten percent of the positions with direct responsibility for profit and loss. In 2008, it was the same.

Although there was some progress in the number of women on boards of directors in the first half of the decade, there was nearly none in the last half. As of 2006, women remained less than fifteen percent of the board directors for Fortune 500 companies. Nearly half of these companies had just one woman or no women on their boards. Stung by criticism for their lack of diversity, by 2008 only thirteen percent of Fortune 500 companies had no women on their boards. But the overall percentage of women on boards barely changed, so this was not progress but rather merely reshuffling the deck. The total number of board positions decreased slightly during this period, which means that for every company that added a woman, another with at least two on its board dropped one. By 2010, women broad members still were less than sixteen percent of the total.

It’s probably not a coincidence that law firm management shows similar percentages. A survey in 1999 found that only sixteen percent of the equity partners in the one hundred largest American law firms were women. Another survey in 2009 found the equity partner percentage had not changed.

Because of Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin’s historic bids in the Presidential race, and Nancy Pelosi’s ascendency to Speaker of the House, some believe that women made significant gains in elective politics in twenty-first century America. But the sad truth is that women’s hold on political power in the U.S. seems by some measures to no longer be increasing and may even be declining. The percentage of women in elected statewide offices in 2008 shrunk to its lowest level since 1994, at twenty-three percent. It fell half a percent lower still in 2010. In 2008, women were mayors in only eleven of the one hundred largest American cities, a drop of four percentage points from just a few years before. The percentage of women mayors in American cities of at least 30,000 persons was less than sixteen percent in 2008, down five percentage points from 1999. Female representation in state legislatures basically flatlined at twenty-three percent starting in 1999.

In 1997, the U.S. ranked forty-first internationally for female representation in national legislatures. By 2008, the U.S. had fallen to seventieth. At this rate, the U.S. could be at the bottom of the rankings in just two decades.

It’s ironic that in the fourth decade of the modern women’s movement many indicators of women’s participation in government and business are flat, and some are negative. Building on prior efforts, nearly all these indicators should at this point be climbing. But they’re not. A decade from now, will we be looking back at another ten years of zero or minimal growth? Without determined national effort, it’s a distinct possibility.

U.S. slips in gender gap rankings.

Another in a series of paradoxes:
According to the Associated Press, the U.S. scored lower in the annual Global Gender Gap Report because the percentage of female legislators, senior officials and managers fell in 2007, and the pay gap between women and men widened.

Why is the U.S. 31st in the world in gender equality and not in the top ten? In part, it's a choice voters and potential voters are making. Young single women, whose opportunities are most affected by this gap, are a group that has in the past been least likely to vote.