Ban Salary Negotiations to Help Women
When Reddit, the popular online web forum, recently prohibited salary negotiations, to eliminate the gender pay gap, the new policy “struck many as absurd,” said Laura Kray. Women make just 78 cents to a man’s dollar, so shouldn’t negotiations be a tool to help women? “In a perfect world, I would agree.” However, we have “two decades of rigorous empirical research” showing women are at a profound cultural disadvantage in negotiations. Teaching women to be “better” negotiators isn’t going to work, because “negotiation is a man’s game with men’s rules.” Women can’t simply be “more like men” at the bargaining table because people “don’t want them to be.”
Research shows men and women alike react unfavorably to women who ask for more money; they are seen as “shrewish” and “especially demanding.” Another study found women who “engage in selfpromotion” in job interviews risk not being hired. Our culture expects women “to be warm, empathetic, and unselfish,” even at the office. So professional women are “damned if they do and damned if they don’t.” Banning negotiations—and making salaries public as a way of checking an employer’s faithfulness to equality—is the “best option” for getting women “the salaries they deserve.”
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