Salary Disparity

Assignment 3 –Critique -   Babcock, L. and Laschever, S. (2003).   Women don’t ask, in Women don’t ask:   Negotiation and the gender divide (pp. 1-16).   Princeton, NJ:   Princeton University Press

    There have been great technological advances, improved manufacturing processes and greater efficiencies in the workplace since I first entered the workforce in 1975; however, there has always been one issue that has not changed much over the years; that is the disparity in salary between men and women.   In the article “Women Don’t Ask” (Babcock and Laschever, 2003), a group of female graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University approached Dr. Babcock, who was a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, to lodge a complaint that their male counterparts in the university’s PhD program were teaching courses on their own, whereas the women were working only as teaching assistants.   When Dr. Babcock presented the complaint to the dean, it was explained that the men simply came and asked to teach a course, whereas none of the women had asked.   This prompted Dr. Babcock to study gender differences when it comes to pay, raises and promotions in the workplace.   After conducting several research experiments, Babcock learned that the disparity in pay seemed correlated to how men and women negotiate and/or how men ask for more than women rather then discrimination.
    Based on Dr. Dr. Babcock’s research experiments, there are some helpful key points and negotiation tools that would be valuable to apply when negotiating salary and benefits in the future.   A main point in all of the studies that Babcock presented in the article is that women tend to not initiate negotiations as often as men do and women tend to not to ask for things such as a higher salary once an offer is presented, which the studies have shown that those who fail to negotiate suffer in the long term.   An example of one study that Babcock conducted that was eye-opening was the study where...