Can 10 Million Women Negotiate the Pay Gap Away?

(Bloomberg) -- On a Tuesday night in September, 50 women filed into a windowless lecture hall in the basement of the Bronx Public Library. For two hours, they participated in a professional development workshop that promised to sharpen negotiation skills that would help them get pay bumps and job offers. They were there because they didn’t think they were getting the money they deserved.

Some people took the class because they wanted to prepare themselves for future conversations about pay. Others already knew they were underpaid. Emily Godoy, who works in both the food services and the nonprofit industries, learned her coworkers were getting $15 an hour more than her to do the same job. Faatimah Croston was working at a school when she learned she was making $20,000 less than a colleague. When her managers refused to give her a raise, she quit. 

The American Association of University Women runs these workshops in an effort to tackle such problems. In 2015, the nonprofit embarked on a nationwide initiative to train 10 million women with negotiation skills as part of its plan to close the gender pay gap by the year 2030. So far, AAUW has reached over 150,000 women in a dozen cities and states around the country, including Boston, Washington and Kansas City, Missouri. The project came to New York last month, where the AAUW, in partnership with the New York City Economic Development Corp., hopes to teach a further 10,000 women. In addition to an online course, 10 in-person classes are planned across all five boroughs through the end of the year. All of it is free.

In the Bronx, Gloria Blackwell, a senior vice president at the AAUW, started the class by rattling off statistics about the gender pay gap: Women, on average, are paid 20% less than men in the U.S.; black women, who made up a majority of the audience, make even less, some 62% of what white men are paid. “I bet there's no one sitting here that believes that that is fair at all,” Blackwell said. Women in the audience snapped in agreement.  

For the most part, the course offered practical advice that anyone would find useful. The group learned how to write a “value statement” to accurately describe their achievements and say how those translate into value for an employer. They talked about deflection strategies for when a recruiter asks for salary history—which is illegal in New York and 16 other states—or pushes for a number early in the interview process. If that happens, Blackwell suggested an applicant say something such as: “I’d like to see if I’m a good fit before we discuss salary” or “I’d appreciate it if you could make me an offer, based on whatever you have budgeted for this position.” 

The women were engaged and interested, and might end up getting raises. But it’s an open question that the workshop will do much to close the pay gap. In the early aughts, a body of research found compelling evidence that women didn’t negotiate their salaries as frequently as men, suggesting that if women asked for more money, they’d close some of the gap themselves. (Only about 5% of  the pay gap is attributable to unexplained salary differences.) Books and advice columns coached women to have tough conversations about pay—and they complied. According to a 2017 survey of 70,000 workers from McKinsey & Co. and Lean In, women now ask for raises and promotions as often as men do.

Just asking, however, doesn’t seem to be enough. Those women in the McKinsey and Lean In survey were still less likely than men to get raises and promotions. Instead, they tended to receive feedback that they were “aggressive” and “bossy” for asking. Other studies have confirmed that when women ask for more money, they’re penalized for it more often than men.

“It seems very innocent to tell everyone to negotiate more,” said Lise Vesterlund, an economics professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies gender differences in the labor market. “We tend to have this view that the worst thing that can happen is someone says no,” she explained. “We know that’s not the worst thing that can happen.”
 

The AAUW and the Economic Development Corp. both note that the workshops are just one of many initiatives they offer aimed at closing the pay gap. “While we wholly agree that it’s not incumbent upon women to negotiate away the pay gap, every woman needs to advocate for herself, and the workshops offer skills that can be applied to many aspects of business,” said Faye Penn, the executive director of Women.NYC, which oversees the workshops and other programs for women that the city runs. 

This assumption, that women need to change their behavior, is the underlying premise of negotiation workshops. But the women in attendance in the Bronx already had many of the skills taught in the class. They already knew how to find appropriate job postings, and they articulated their value statements with clarity. The class did perk up when the instructors showed them such resources as PayScale and Salary.com, where they learned to look up the market rate for a given position. They hadn’t known about them.

Mostly though, the women wanted to know how to deal with specific roadblocks they’d faced. Over and over, the attendees brought up scenarios wherein they had faced issues that had little to do with their negotiation skills. Several women asked versions of the same question: What should they do if they discover they’re underpaid, and their bosses won’t do anything about it?

The instructors didn’t have entirely satisfying answers to their questions. They often told the women to have a walk-away number, the lowest possible salary you’re willing to accept before walking away or leaving a job. That doesn’t necessarily help women get more money. 

Two years in, AAUW hasn’t yet shown that its workshops result in much more than a confidence boost. The organization says that according to its post-course surveys, 95% of women found its classes valuable, and 86% say they left with an above average or high level of negotiation skills. AAUW says that “thousands” of women who have taken the course have negotiated starting salaries or raises 10% to 20% higher than the asking offer, but the AAUW says that’s more of a “guestimate than real data.”  One small survey of 52 participants found that 25 women used the skills they learned to negotiate for a raise, either in a current job or a new position. 

Even those success stories are more complicated than they seem. When Marie Villegas took AAUW’s course in 2017, she had recently gotten a promotion but no pay bump. A week after she took the class, she decided to ask for a raise. She followed the steps she’d learned: She researched the market value for her position, a project manager working in the Washington area, and explained to her boss how her new role, given her skills, should pay from $15,000 to $20,000 more than she was making.

Her boss agreed to a $10,000 raise, which the AAUW would consider a win. But the reason Villegas didn’t get more money, she was told, was because she had already received an $8,000 raise earlier in the year, when she was still at her lower position. In other words, her employer used her salary history to pay her a below-market rate. Villegas did everything right and still came up short. “At first I was disappointed, to be honest,” she said. But, she added, “something is better than nothing.”

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Claire Suddath at csuddath@bloomberg.net, Janet Paskin

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