ninme

I’m glad this got printed cuz the same thing came out a couple years ago and I think it predated my trusty ol’ external memory drive (if I saved it to my hard drive, god, good luck cuz I’m not wading down there) and ever since whenever the topic of wage disparity comes up I always use this:

The Times - If women don’ t ask, they’re asking for it
Would you see your boss for a pay rise? by Camilla Cavendish

Remuneration Economics have found that the pay gap between male and female managers in Britain is 12 per cent, rising to a staggering 23 per cent at director level. Their survey is pretty robust: the 42,000 men and women it compares may not be doing exactly the same jobs as one another, but they do have the same job titles. And they have produced the same annual survey for years. So their finding that the pay gap has actually started to widen, for the first time in a decade, is important.

Predictable claims of male conspiracy, however, don’t sound quite right. For the same survey shows that women are being promoted faster than men – mostly by men. The average female team leader is, at 37, five years younger than her male counterpart. The average female director is four years younger. In fact, the CMI says that this could partly explain the widening of the pay gap. For a newly promoted and manager who is five years younger might plausibly start on less than a more experienced peer. …

Women are advancing into every corner of life. So why don’t we get paid the same? In a recent Grazia magazine survey of 5,000 people, 80 per cent of women said they felt underpaid. But, only 35 per cent of them had ever asked for a pay rise. Research in Linda Babcock’s 2004 book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, found that 93 per cent of female graduates from a US university simply accepted the starting salaries they were offered in their first job, while more than half of the male graduates tried to negotiate up. I was so grateful to get my first job I would never have dreamt of trying something like that.

2004. That’s probably when it was, then. Anyway, the giant load of pellets:

When I first had to manage staff, I was amazed by how naturally some men would provide a running commentary on their achievements. The women tended to assume that their untrumpeted hard work would be rewarded: of course it wasn’t. The irony is that the women who are the best team players, who don’t like to waste anyone else’s time, who think “They’ll give me what is fair”, routinely lose out to those who shout louder. Even my (female) babysitter says: “Oh, how much is up to you.” Can you imagine a man saying that?

Women? The best team players? Right, which is why male-dominated armies, navies, and all the rest of them have been such utter failures in advancing world history. But at any rate, the original spate of articles on this subject, sparked I would assume by that book, had a lot to say about how men do a good job because then they can go to their bosses and say “Look at this good job” and ask for more money. Women do a good job and then expect their bosses to give them a raise as a sign that he appreciates her. And when their bosses don’t voluntarily come forward with a bouquet of flowers, diamond necklace, and higher pay package, they sulk and become resentful and think it’s because they’re not appreciated. They never actually say any of this, but they expect that the men in the office know all this and are doing what men do because the men are plotting. It’s absurd. Women can’t do anything together without it being fraught with politics and undercurrents of cattiness and levels of mind-reading (on target and otherwise) that would turn a crystal ball green.

Ridiculous creatures.