PR for People Monthly June 2017 | Page 23

I’ve felt compelled to leave the American salaried workforce since my first jobs back in 1996. There’s always some sexual harassment, intimidation, insults, devaluing, and general ill will directed at me when I work for anybody else. There might be some women who never experience these problems, but all women who withdraw into self-employment probably have. There’s a chance I’ll continue attempting to break the ceiling within the academia, but my head is really aching from trying.

7.4% pay increase that is present only if a candidate negotiates, instead of simply accepting the first offer. Of course, this logic is easily disrupted when one remembers that women make 81% of men’s salaries, and not 93%. Lax argues that men “tend to negotiate… while women are far more likely to accept a firm offer without even attempting to negotiate” (50). In reality, I’ve tried to negotiate my offered salary every time, and no school has ever offered even a $1 increase; I was always told the offer would be dropped if I did not accept it as-is. This refusal to negotiate might have been because of my gender on the part of the schools, but I certainly am not less willing to object to lower pay because I am a woman.

The idea that women don’t negotiate is propagated by other questionable studies, such as the “Large-Scale natural Field Experiment” (of 2,500 job seekers) performed by Andreas Leibbrandt and John A. List, who conclude that if the offer’s negotiability isn’t explained, women are more likely to accept the first proposal. Past experiences of being refused salary increases in negotiations might have conditioned women into this response, and there might be other biases that skew these results. There are a lot of men that profit from these types of findings, so I would need to see a similar study performed by female researchers, but no female academic would propose such an imaginative excuse for sex discrimination.

I conceived an idea to write about sex salary discrimination when I read about the Department of Labor’s April 7, 2017 filing against Google for “burying the fact that it pays its female employees less than their male counterparts.” The Economist’s article offers shocking statistics about the majority of women in Silicon Valley being excluded from networking, being sexually harassed, and being on the verge of quitting. The problem DoL is focusing on is that Google is refusing to offer data on how much the women in its organization are paid comparative to the men. Such statistics are frequently lacking when women attempt to take their employers to court, and in this case even the federal government can’t get the info from a single corporation it’s focusing on. Acknowledging this void, like the Economist’s writer, I also opted to look at the bigger picture.

I previously published a book on this topic: Gender Bias in Mystery and Romance Novel Publishing: Mimicking Masculinity and Femininity. Here are a couple of tables from it that explain this problem. The first table shows that women score better than men in analytic writing and around the same in verbal and quantitative skills on the GRE, and in parallel complete equivalent or higher education levels then men in many fields.

If women are as smart as men according to standardized tests, then only sex discrimination can explain these statistics from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research:

Figure 1. GRE Scores for Men and Women in 2013

If women are as smart as men according to standardized tests, then only sex discrimination can explain these statistics from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research:

Figure 2. State Indicators of Social and Economic Status for Men and Women