Workshop tells women to 'Start Smart'

Dr. Evelyn F. Murphy, author of Getting Even: Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men and What to Do About It, joined 21 female Boston College students on Wednesday night to present the first of her three-hour hands-on workshops titled, "Smart Start."

The workshop, which was co-sponsored by the Women's Resource Center (WRC) and the Women's Studies Program, featured tactics from Murphy's Women Are Getting Even (WAGE) Project - a charitable organization formed with the hope to "end discrimination against women in the American workplace in the near future" by taking the steps needed "to ensure that every woman is paid what she's worth."

Murphy, who piloted the presentation at BC in hopes to start a nationwide workshop circuit next fall, explained why and how a wage gap was formed between men and women's salaries and how women employees can work to bridge this gap. With the help of Murphy's WAGE Project site, participants were able to successfully benchmark the salary of the profession they hoped to obtain and learn practical strategies to negotiate the salary they believed matched their qualifications.

One of the reasons that Murphy believes it is so important to negotiate a proper starting salary is that this figure will be the base from which applicants will be evaluated for promotions and raises in the future. If you start at a salary that is too low for your qualifications when compared with other male employees, she said, it will add up in the long run, even if it is only a few thousand dollars difference in the beginning. In fact, according to her research, Murphy said that over the course of their careers, female college graduates earn an average of $1.2 million dollars less than their male college graduate counterparts.

"But this doesn't happen all at once," she said. "It's the small pieces that accumulate over the years and add up to that larger figure." According to the 2004 U.S. Census, women earn an average of 77 cents for every man's dollar. This statistic drops to 68 cents for every man's dollar when the women are categorized as "African American" and plummets to only 57 cents for every man's dollar when the women are grouped as "Hispanic."

According to Judith Clair, a professor in the organizational studies department of CSOM, such biases often affect the evaluations of women in the workplace, which in turn affect their ability to move into upper-management positions and leadership roles. "Subjects in studies [from the Implicit Association Test] tend to be biased toward perceiving men as more 'leader-like' than women because how we define leaders tends to be consistent with the stereotypical qualities associated with men. These subtle biases may depress women's salaries relative to men, even for men and women who have otherwise equal qualifications and hold the same positions," Clair said in an e-mail.

Eva Garroutte, a professor in the sociology department, said that one of the most important stereotypes that affect the depression of women's salaries is the fact that women often have an interrupted career pattern. "For example, they are expected to follow the norm that 'care giving is women's work,' which effects their careers. Because women do not have an identical career trajectory as men, the choices they make are oftentimes within a certain menu of what they feel is made available to them," Garroutte said.

Because such stereotypes and biases are unavoidable, Murphy proposes that women make sure they have all the facts about an organization or company before they are hired so that they can make the best case for themselves when negotiating a starting salary. "Establish a target wage and juxtapose your résumé against the requirements of the position," she said. "Also consider ways to negotiate the compensation package, which includes your benefits, moving costs, or a signing bonus."