You get the gist: Paula is absolutely right that even though I’m gay, I’m a man; and definitely consider negotiation of salary to be expected. I just assume a potential employer is low-balling me, and if I’ve passed second-round interviews, background checks, and received an offer, they really want me (but they try to save $$$). I have nothing to lose by negotiating, and everything to gain.

So take Paula’s advice! Get what you are worth.

Karen

What gets me to thinking though is how much the salary gap is caused by women’s reluctance to negotiate salary. I know I haven’t done so in the past. We have a sense either that we’re not confident enough, it wouldn’t be “nice”, or deep down that we’re not worth it or maybe we don’t know how to negotiate. Yet, male counterparts think nothing of negotiating salary all the time in their favor. Used to driving a hard bargain, or maybe it is just “expected”.

I wonder if we started negotiating more for what we’re worth & refusing to settle if it’d have any effect on that gap.

Great article & the compounding of the problem is truly eye opening.

I’m horrified that the wage gap has lost ground. Of course, it doesn’t help that except for a tiny group at the top, wages are shrinking across the board…

Anyway, I just wanted to make sure we talk about these things knowledgeably so that less-than-supportive folks don’t get to quibble about minutia.

Female couples tend to have fewer children than male-female couples, and thus may have greater amounts of disposable income, compared to their counterparts.

So, bisexual women and lesbians who are in same-sex relationships (like Mrs. and Mrs. QQQ) might be doing a little better than the numbers above suggest, although, of course, not as well as Mr. and Mrs. AAA combined.

Sign me,
A bi woman who is one half of a female couple, sans children

In that case it wouldn’t matter if the woman was in a same sex partnership (or, actually, any kind of partnership, now that I think about it) and was the one focusing on career rather than childcare — she would still be penalized due to social assumptions. Factoring in a household where the two economic providers are both mothers might actually make the numbers worse — one woman with the full mother penalty as Dana mentions above and the other with a partial mother penalty (the partial coming from her focus on her career doing what it can to off-set the things working on holding her salary down).

I say this just to muddy the waters even further…

In a lesbian couple with kids, however, even if one of the partners has more childcare duties, that leaves one woman free to focus on career and the potential greater salary that can go with that focus. In theory, this means that the QQQs and the AAAs could earn the same. Gender bias means this isn’t always the case–but the situation might not always be as bad as you outline, either. (If the lesbian couple splits childcare duties, then one would assume each woman’s earning power is still more than that of primary-care moms, but less than that of a career-focused husband, and the numbers would probably end up about the same.)

I admit this is all theoretical, and needs to be backed up with statistical studies. I throw it out here as a further aspect for discussion.