Slightly Off KIlter

Hmmmmm… they may have something here.

When economics Professor Linda Babcock examined the starting salaries of people who graduated with master’s degrees from Carnegie Mellon University, she found that men earned nearly $4,000 per year more than women with comparable majors. A lot of that difference was because of discrimination, certainly, but not in the way you might think.

The male graduates were simply more discriminating about their pay than the women were.

Babcock discovered that 57 percent of the men didn’t immediately accept the starting salary offered for that first job. They negotiated. But among the female graduates — and this was in 2002, not the 1950s — only 7 percent negotiated for more money.

The graduates who negotiated were able to increase their pay by more than $4,000 per year. So if more women had simply asked for more money, the gender gap in salary would have been slashed, Babcock said.

[c.f. Women need to negotiate , Dave Murphy, “On the Fringe”, , SF Chronicle, Saturday Dec. 6, 2003]

Do I negotiate? Rarely, if at all; it’s not my style.

I’ve never been a bargainer. For example, in car shopping, I walk onto a used car lot, look at the cars, decide if I like the sticker price and make an offer. I may ask for an addition (“Could you add factory air for a reduced price?”) but generally, I look at the price and decide if I think it’s a good price. My Dad is the type who asks “Will you knock $2000 of the price if I pay cash?”. I simply don’t think that way. I’ve always known I wasn’t a bargainer in terms of cars, houses, appliances, etc. It simply never occurred to me to try to dicker for my starting salary for a job.

For my first job out of grad school (Sept. 1984), “they” asked me what salary I “wanted”. Knowing (having looked it up) the average starting salary for a “bench Microbiologist” with an M.S. — and having several years of Comp. Sci. classes and a computer analysis thesis behind me — I asked for half again as much. In retrospect, given how quickly “they” agreed to the figure, I’ve always wondered if I should have asked for more.

Two years later, when I moved to Apple as an engineer, I got a substantial (35%) raise, that being “the lowest amount we pay incoming engineers at the lowest grade level”. Yowza.

When I moved to Taligent 6 years later following an Apple layoff, Taligent offered me exactly what I’d been making at Apple, stating that they “couldn’t appear to be offering inducements to move across the street”. After that, every time I changed companies (4 more times over the next 8 years), I was asked for my salary expectations and I always said “I want at least as much as I am making now, preferably a little more.” I was always asked first (no salary range was ever specified for the job); I replied; then “they” told me their offer and I always said yes. Each time, the offer was, as requested, a little more than I had made previously.

Might the starting offers have been higher if I had specifically asked for more? How much did the fact that I was anxious to change jobs affect my placing a higher value on “getting the job” than on “getting more money”?

When I decided to try independent contracting, I was lucky in my first contract; the Internet boom was still on. I used the standard Contracting Rule of Thumb (take your annual expected salary, divide that by 1000, and use the result as your $/hour rate.) Then the dot-bomb burst and my next contract offer was “We like you but we can’t afford that.” They named a lower rate; I accepted; they gave me a 20% “raise” after 3 months.

Since then, I’ve had two more contracts. Both times I was asked what I wanted, then told that the client couldn’t go any higher than $X/hour (where X was lower than I’d asked). In the first case I did a little negotiating, getting the number bumped up by $2/hour to a “round number”. In the second case, I thanked them politely, said no, hung up, reconsidered, decided that X was better than 0, and called back to say yes. (I hate to say that each time, X was lower than before 😦

It’s nice to know that the study mentioned in the article was done in 2002 during the midst of the “current job unpleasantness”. It’s nice to know that some people are still able to negotiate a higher starting salary. I wonder how different things might have been over the years if I had tried harder… then again, at least when I feel forced to accept a much-less-than-desirable hourly rate, it doesn’t seem as quite as low as it might otherwise seem… if I’d been drawing megabucks at the height of the boom times.

Have you ever tried negotiating for a higher starting salary? Were you successful?