Managing Leadership^®

Amy Joyce, a columnist at the Washington Post, published an item in yesterday’s edition that you all should read. It quotes a fascinating study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), along with some commentary by a professor who has published on the topic of women and negotiation.

We all know that there is a pronounced pay gap between men and women in comparable positions. The AAUW, which has been tracking this for going on 100 years, says that generally, women are paid about 23% less than men. Many explanations are offered for this discrepancy, prominent among them the greater likelihood (or fear) that women will leave their career paths for marriage, childbirth, or to follow spouses who are reassigned. When they re-enter the workforce, they tend to be penalized for the lost experience, connections, and currency by being paid at lower ranges than men for equivalent jobs.

The interesting thing about the current study, though, is that it was conducted among men and women only one year after graduation from university, before any such considerations could possibly be factors in the pay gap. Yet, there is a pronounced pay gap - 20% - almost as much as is found between men and women further along in their careers.

The commentator ascribes much of this to a failure by women to negotiate, or even simply to ask, for more compensation, either during the hiring process or later. The professor conducted a study a few years ago in which she found a 7.6% discrepancy in the pay between male and female graduates with master’s degrees. Upon examining the issue, she discovered that, generally, the women accepted their initial pay offers, while over half the men negotiated for - and received - an amount that virtually by itself accounts for the entire discrepancy. Does the lifelong discrepancy in pay have its source in this first employment negotiation?

It would seem, then, that the pay discrepancy is not due solely to differences in experience and currency of skills arising from interruptions in one’s career - it’s due to gender-based attitudes about one’s worth and self-interest, and how to address these. Please do click over to the referenced item and read it for more than I’ve covered here - it’s a fairly quick, and certainly an enlightening, read.

It would be easy to conclude from this that we need to find a way for women to be more ambitious in assessing their ability to contribute and aggressive in demanding that that assessment be acknowledged. That, no doubt, should be done. But it is worth noting, as well, that hiring personnel should consider the issue also, and be cautious about an undue emphasis on costs without consideration of the impact on an organization when otherwise baseless discrepancies such as these become apparent. Moreover, we should take a look at who these hiring decision-makers are - men or women? Would women be better at recognizing the value women candidates have to offer a position, or seeing through the assertive promises about that professed by male candidates?

At the very least, as the economy - and, indeed, society - generally becomes more complex and dependent upon employees who possess and can manipulate knowledge and information, we need to become better at managing them. Make no mistake about it, that gunfire you hear isn’t just female job-seekers shooting themselves in the foot - it’s all of us. None of us can afford for long to lose a step here.

Note: I want to take a moment to direct your attention to the “Managing Leadership” logo in the grey rectangle in the sidebar to the right, located just below the book jacket cover. If you hover over it with your mouse, you’ll see that it’s a link to a new toolbar that you can download and use on your browser. You do need to be using a PC with Windows 2000 or XP, and IE 5.0 or higher or Firefox 1.0.1 or higher (sorry Mac users! I understand that the producer is working on this for you guys also). The company that makes this toolbar also makes them for a number of widely-known organizations of all kinds, including Major League Baseball in the US.

With this toolbar, wherever you happen to be browsing at the moment, you can return to the Managing Leadership Blog by clicking on the Managing Leadership logo (that’s one of my favorite features!). Here are some of the other things you can do:

• You can do a search from the toolbar. In addition to Google, you can use the drop-down window (at the magnifying glass icon) to choose to search in several other venues, from an excellent dictionary, encyclopedia, stocks - even eBay. You can also elect to do a search of the site you’re on at the moment, or even of the Managing Leadership Blog site.
• A highliter.
• Links to a couple of my sites: the blog and a new one I’ve established that I’ll be telling you about in the next few days. Please tell me what other links you might like to see listed there. Note that you cannot add or modify these - you’ll have to use your own favorites/bookmarking menu for that, but you can make suggestions to me and they will show up on your Managing Leadership Toolbar as I have them incorporated.
• There is a feeds menu that is populated with a few of the sites I visit every day. I would be pleased to hear your suggestions about what feeds you would like to see added here, as well. Changes to this menu are done the same as with the links menu.
• Messages. This is the principle reason I decided to establish and offer the toolbar. Here, I can send messages viewable by everyone of you who has installed the toolbar. Moreover, you can respond to these. Consequently, it provides a means for us to communicate with each other as we see things on the internet that appear to be of interest generally, that we want to comment on, or that you may want to see discussed in the main blog.
• There is also an email notifier - a nice feature - which you can use or not as you wish, and a pop-up blocker, which you can also choose to use or not.
• A weather indicator. This icon shows the sky conditions and temperature for your city. If you click on it, it provides a three day forecast, and allows you to get an extended forecast, change between Centigrade and Fahrenheit, or change the city (around the world) if it didn’t automatically select the right one for your location.
• If you drop the window down at the Managing Leadership Logo, you get several other choices, including Toolbar Options, which you can use, among other things, to add extra icons to the toolbar. For example, on my toolbar I’ve added icons for Windows Media and the Windows Calculator, so I can access them without minimizing windows or going through the Start menus. You can put icons up there for other common programs. Very convenient.

I’ve used the toolbar for several days and have found it to be an unobtrusive and useful feature to have on my browser. I look forward to communicating via it with others of you who install it (The rest of us will only know you’ve done so, by the way, if you choose to post a note on the message menu).

Speaking of that, note that when you click on the Managing Leadership Toolbar icon in the sidebar (or on the link in this sentence), you will be taken to a download page. When you first install the toolbar, it will automatically open a browser window with a page that explains some if its uses and features. Don’t worry, this is only done to let you see how you can use the toolbar - your home page has not been changed - nor has anything else. Once you close that window, you will find that you will next open at your own home page as usual. Additionally, should you decide you want to uninstall it, just open your control panel, go to “Add or Remove Programs” and click on “Managing Leadership Toolbar.”

But give it a chance first! - it will grow on you, and you’ll find yourself using it routinely - that’s what happened with me.

Enjoy!

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