What can YOU do?
Women being good negotiators and defending their posture: a lot less common than what you might think. It’s practically been a man’s world until recently when a fourth wave of increased amount of attention has been given to women's rights around 2010 (Baumgardner, Jennifer (2011), https://books.google.com/) . The escalation in this matter of awareness is magnificent. But in order to start breaking the glass ceiling, or an invisible but real barrier through which the next stage or level of advancement can be seen, but cannot be reached by a section of qualified and deserving employees, we should spread awareness that females should start negotiating, refuse to settle for less than they deserve, and take initiative to defend their pride and self worth.
Women are not taking the risk to parley when they should be doing everything in their power to start negotiating for their own benefit. Women are already underrepresented as a whole. Now if individual women don’t speak up for themselves, then this trend will continue repeating itself. The graph below has three questions and has a number of responses from both men and women. As you can see, women hesitated the most when it came time to make a negotiation and even when to plan the next one. If you look below the graph itself, you will find some text.
The text at states, “demonstrate women’s hesitation to negotiate.” So, seeing that this visual tells us that females are hesitant to negotiate strongly supports that women are not taking a risk to negotiate. Which is unfortunate since, by taking that risk they might have gotten some sort of benefit. By simply making it clear about what you want, understanding the constraints of the company, and maintaining a sense of perspective, women can have more flexible hours, a higher salary, or even to work from home at least once a week (Malhotra, D. (2014, April). These are all very likable benefits that anybody could benefit from. And all of them achievable by going and making a negotiation. Simply put, negotiating can bring a line of desirable perks that could be very helpful. However, being able to conciliate requires not settling and making that clear. This brings us to our next pressing matter.
Women have and continue to settle for much less than what they actually deserve, which is another trend that should also be refused among females. Women allow themselves to settle instead of working on making a valid argument to justify themselves. In the article written by Harvard Business Review, they mentioned a study where “Subjects were told that they would be observed playing a word game and that they would be paid between $3 and $10 for playing. After each subject completed the task, an experimenter thanked the participant and said, “Here’s $3. Is $3 OK?” For the men, it was not OK, and they said so. Their requests for more money exceeded the women’s by nine to one.” (Babcock, L., Laschever, S., Gelfand, M., & Small, D. (2003, October). Nice Girls Don't Ask). Women are not speaking up about not being happy with what they are given when they deserve more, so instead, they settle and bear it. Bringing us to the conclusion that women are settling instead of speaking up.
(Babcock, L., Laschever, S., Gelfand, M., & Small, D. (2003, October). Can We Talk [Graph describing how often women ask for a promotion compared to men]. Retrieved February 1, 2017, from https://hbr.org/2003/10/nice-girls-dont-ask)
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