Physician-Negotiate Thyself!

The Boston Globe reports today that women physician-scientists lose more than $350,000 in salary over the course of a 30-year career and much of the blame is being placed on women’s failure to ask.

The blame-placing is anecdotal, but research in other professions suggests that we women have much to do with the wage, income and leadership gaps we suffer.

‘‘Male faculty members are willing to negotiate more aggressively.

It may be social and cultural. It seems to be fairly deep-rooted,’’ said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a professor at Harvard Medical School.

Manson, who as a division chief helps makes salary decisions, says men much more frequently than women ask her for salary increases and promotions.

via Women MDs paid less: reluctant to push for raises? 

Why, why, why, why, why?

Ladies, listen up.

It’s been 40 years since the Second Wave Women’s Movement sent tens of thousands of us into the professions.

Yet I’ve had the sad task of reporting here that women lawyers feel bullied out of origination credit, women in science hesitate to patent their inventions, women in business fail to seek raises and women in finance continue to put up with sexual harassment and discrimination as bad as anything we faced back in the days of Mad Men.

Let’s not beat ourselves up.

Let’s be honest about the causes and vow to take one baby step to narrow the gap in our own lives.

Here are three of the reasons we fail to ask, each with its own baby-step solution.

We Value Relationship More than Money

We are the species’ social glue and there’s no reason for us to give up that role to self-seek and self-serve at every possible opportunity.

But if you’re being paid less than your male counterpart for no reason other than your hesitation to ask for more, you’re not doing anyone any favors – not yourself, not your family and not the community of women whose income is anchoredby every other woman’s wage gap.

The solution is to learn interest-based negotiation strategy and tactics.

Not interested?

Continue reading at Forbes Woman