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Comment by kolinko | Hacker News Reader

In general, women tend to negotiate less aggressively (there's research supporting that), so if your friend was paid less, it doesn't necessarily mean there was discrimination.

The question is: is she as good at negotiating her salary as her male friends?

Also, it sometimes happens that the market's salaries increase over time, and new employees get paid more than the old ones. It's a difficult and well known manager's dilemma - I cannot hire a new person for the same price as the current employees, but if I have to raise everyone's pay first, I won't be able to hire the new person anyway.

So, the question is - did the interns' wages differ between them according to gender? Did she earn less than female interns, or male interns? How good/aggressive are the people you compare in terms of salary negotiation?

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Women who do negotiate aggressively are often less likely to be granted what they ask for, also. There’s a new study I recall that women ask for raises at the same rate as men but are not granted raises at the same rate as men.

Sounds like they don't negotiate efficiently. "Please give me a raise" is not efficient negotiation, no matter how aggressively or often you say it.

Note that aggressive tactics are not as effective when women do them. We also have studies that state that women who attempt to be assertive similar to men are not received as well as men. So women are disadvantaged because there is no way to ask for a raise or negotiate as effectively as a man in the general case.

Possible counterpoint conclusion: when a woman says "please give me a raise" and a man says "please give me a raise" people are more likely to listen to a man.

You're injecting a whole lot of assumption on how these negotiations are happening.

You're basing this off of statistics that ignore how these negotiations happen. Or really any sort of nuance that makes a difference in the real world. Like the quality of work the individual outputs or how much the company needs them, or how well they're perceived by their peers overall, or just how smartly they approach their employer when negotiating.

"Please give me a raise" is not a negotiation. To negotiate properly you need a trump card, "please give me a raise" doesn't show one.

Who the hell says "please give me a raise"? You've already put yourself in a position of weakness, man or woman.

I deserve a raise because...3 reasons. I have accomplished xyz and want a raise.

In my younger years I said I wanted a raise of 20 percent immediately after telling my manager that I told a coworker "to go fuck himself" twice.

You can play this game all day, at what point is the other party at fault?

It depends. I have been penalized for negotiating as well as have been rewarded. I do remember distinctly irritating a hiring manager when I responded to her inquiry of "how much do you want to make" with "whatever is the prevailing market rate is" She wanted me to give her a number and I politely played hard ball not wanting to undersell myself. Anyway the hiring manager decided that approach made me difficult.

Women are often penalized for not being "nice" in the workplace as well. It may happen in the hiring process or show up later in performance reviews. It is a delicate dance of negotiating, being strong and being "non-threatening."

I would like to know if you've been penalized for negotiating as well as rewarded at the same or similar rates of your peers of various gender identities. Do you know that?

I would presume no negotiation tactic has a perfect 0% or 100% success rate for any given gender expression, but I am curious about the relative rates for them and how this can best benefit all related parties.

In that study, was the statistical risk that a female employee would leave the company because not getting a raise the same as for a male employees?

> In general, women tend to negotiate less aggressively (there's research supporting that), so if your friend was paid less, it doesn't necessarily mean there was discrimination.

That's not a given. Courts tend to look at end results, not how you get there.

>In general, women tend to negotiate less aggressively (there's research supporting that), so if your friend was paid less, it doesn't necessarily mean there was discrimination.

The real question is why aggressive negotiation for doing the same job should lead to fairly different salaries. Forget gender, race, etc. If I can negotiate a higher salary than my coworker who does the same job, I'm not seeing a really good reason why I should get paid more.

If we are going to normalize this reason, then it's two faced for a company not to mention it. When it comes to the internal dialogue, performance reviews, etc, are all about the work you did, and how it impacted the company. If aggressive negotiation is a valid strategy, I would like the company to be transparent about it. List it at the same level as your work performance when listing the criteria by which you are evaluated.

Edit:

Too many of us treat salaries as a game. When we play board games, we often accept rather arbitrary rules. One of the rules that many put on this salary game is: "Well, he gets more pay for the same work because he can negotiate well". Somehow, we don't accept it as a rule in the "school game": "Well, Alice got a higher grade than Bob on this essay because she negotiated better. She brings me two apples a week, and recently threatened to stop giving me apples and give them to Ms Brown of geography."

I'm not, BTW, arguing against negotiating if you're an employee. I'm arguing that companies paying significantly different for similar work just because of negotiation prowess is fundamentally an admission that "Yes, we will pay people differently for the same work." It shouldn't need to become an issue where one group (women, here) feels disadvantaged. It's a problem even if there is no systemic bias. The appropriate thing for the company to do when an employee shows that the market is paying better is to do a salary adjustment (if they can afford it) for all similar employees (barring small deltas for individual performance differences). Without this attitude, they are fundamentally creating an "us vs them" scenario ("company" vs "employees"). Sooner or later, that mentality leads to a large amount of cynicism and an unwillingness to view themselves as a cohesive group ("I'm just going to do my job - I don't care about corporate goals, and am not here to improve the company beyond what they pay me for").

> The real question is why aggressive negotiation for doing the same job should lead to fairly different salaries.

Because the most effective and stable reason to use in negotiation is that you are better and more valuable than the field of other employees and applicants.

There are multiple people with the job “MLB pitcher” or “NFL quarterback” and all their salaries are public. Is it surprising that some of them make wildly more than others?

I think the range of talent and ability for people with the job “senior software engineer” is much wider than the range of talent of “NFL quarterback”.

Because, if you are a knowldege worker, even if you have the same job title you are not doing exactly the same job. There are really two choices here:

- allow people with the same job title (e.g. "Software developer") earn different salaries

- introduce fine grained competence levels (e.g "Software developer, level 23") and require promotion, based on detailed performance review, for every single request for a raise.

I prefer the former, because I don't like bureaucracy, but non-discrimination advocates are pushing towards the latter.

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