Women, Negotiation And The Persistent Wage Gap

Thanks to Ed. at Blawg Review for passing along this (somewhat rambling but well worth watching) lecture at Stanford University by  Deborah Kolb, the Deloitte Ellen Gabriel Professor for Women and Leadership at the Simmons College School of Management.  Hat tip to Guy Kawasaki’s Holy Kaw! where Ed. picked it up.

Kolb appears to be saying that the research on “women don’t ask” is somewhat skewed because it generally concerns distributive (single issue) negotiations; doesn’t control for anything other than gender; and, gives experimental subjects “asks” that are not representative of real world negotiations.

The lecture also covers “gendered” work; organizational obstacles to women’s commercial success; women’s exclusion from rainmaking networks; the motherhood penalty; and, work’s relationship to personal life.

Kolb discusses the issues that must be addressed by the researchers before they can provide genuinely useful negotiation guidance to help women begin to close the wage gap in business and the professions.

Kolb touches on negotiating work-place flexibility – whether it is harmful to those who seek it and how Deloitte’s Women’s Initiative has shown that customized careers can benefit both genders and the organizations in which they work.

In a recent article at Women’s Media – Listening to Women:  New Perspectives on Negotiation – Kolb and co-author Judith Williams have the following negotiation advice for women (which is also excellent advice for men)

                       

Victoria Pynchon

Attorney-mediator Victoria Pynchon is a panelist with ADR Services, Inc. Ms. Pynchon was awarded her LL.M Degree in Dispute Resolution from the Straus Institute in May of 2006, after 25 years of complex commercial litigation practice, with sub-specialties in intellectual property, securities fraud, antitrust, insurance coverage, consumer class actions and all… MORE >