My failure to negotiate…..

Have you heard that one of the reason’s there is a gender pay gap is that we women don’t  negotiate? I have heard it and I believe it because after more than two decades working in the trading business I was never able to negotiate on my own behalf.   In spite of this I may well have ended up achieving equal pay; or not.

When I was a child my mother would tell me that it was impolite to discuss money and we should be grateful for what we are given in life.   I grew up never knowing what my father earned, what our house cost or what anything was worth; including myself. The salary I received for my first job out of college was right in-line with what Campus Recruitment told us we should earn, so I went right out into the world with a “take what you are given” frame of mind.

After two years of working at that job in the commodities business, I was awarded my first bonus that amounted to about 30% of my base pay.   When my manager told me this at annual review time my mouth quite literally fell open.   I turned beet red and couldn’t speak. He saw my reaction and asked me cautiously if I was happy with the number. I said that I was. He then promptly told me that if I was going to stay in this business I had to work on my “poker face”.   He said that my reaction just told him that he paid me more than I had expected; more than he needed to. Some managers, he said would take advantage of that in the future. After a moment he smiled and added: “your reaction absolutely made my day”.   He said I would understand what he meant by that when I became a manager.

Over the years, anytime I changed jobs I was given the salary I needed. When it came around to the “bonus season” I typically received something that met my expectations. It never occurred to me that I wasn’t being paid the same as the men around me. And in those rare times that I had an idea that I was making less than someone else, I would tell myself that there must be a reason and that it didn’t matter in the long run if I was living well and getting my bills paid.

One year, having recently moved to a new company, I was horrified to hear that my bonus was 1% of my base pay, meaning that I was going to make 40% less than I had the year before at the firm I had left

I made a mistake when I joined that company because I had never even asked what the bonus range was before I accepted the offer. I never knew that people could negotiate something called a guaranteed bonus and even if I did know I am not sure I would have had the confidence to do so.   The salary they gave me was slightly more than I had been making at my previous job and since it was the same industry I had mistakenly assumed that the total compensation would be about the same. Worse than that I had taken it for granted that management would just “do the right thing” by me.   I was completely naïve.

Even that year, I didn’t go complaining to my manager about the money.   I went into his office a few weeks later and said I wanted more work to do because I needed to make more money next year. I couldn’t bring myself to ask for more bonus money even though I knew that several of the men on my team had done just that and were given adjustments. I just didn’t have it in me.

Ironically, a full year later in that same firm, I found myself getting 10-15% raises at year-end and then again at mid-year which was unheard of. The department head at the time told me that it was because I had raised my hand and asked for more work the year prior.   It makes for a nice story but it wasn’t true.  I learned a few years later after I had left the company that a new supervisor had asked why the only woman on his team (me) was making so much less than the men.   The men doing the same job were making 75k per year while I was making 50k.   The reason was that I had only asked for 50K so that is all the hiring manager gave me.

Over the years and at different firms I had moved into management and began to deal with hiring and paying staff.   Typically human resources would do the negotiating with new hires but during raise and review time I was front and center in these discussions centered around money. It took a long time for me to get comfortable with the process. People were often furious, sometimes disappointed or at best, satisfied. They were rarely happy.  In my more than 15 years of managing of people, I can recall only a handful of occasions where I sat across from someone who was genuinely happy. There was only one time where I used that speech I had received years before about developing a poker face at bonus time. Needless to say, that speech was given to another woman. In most cases, I was adjusting compensation to bring it in line with where it would have been if those people had negotiated on the way into the company.

I learned to embrace and enjoy the fight for salary and bonus budgets for my team and for others. It was my habit to start lobbying for budget months before any other managers would, making sure I new every performance number and salary level to make my case. I knew exactly when to request off cycle increases to bump up the salary of certain key staff and I knew how to negotiate with the front office to give me the support I needed to pay people. But I would still sit there passively and accept whatever I was given, never being able to keep my neck from getting red when the subject of my own compensation came up. In fact, I was more comfortable resigning from a firm than I was asking for a raise, so, for the most part, I managed my earnings over the years by moving from one job to the next.

There was one occasion when I resigned from my firm only to be lobbied quite heavily by executive leadership to stay. Having told them I was burned-out and ready for a new challenge, these discussions were framed around changing my role and seniority level to give me more exposure to new business areas and to resolve some of the roadblocks I had encountered within the firm. Even here when my boss brought up the subject of salary increase I balked.   I told him he could decide what this new role they were giving me was worth.   He gave me a 15% increase in my base. It was more than I would have asked for so I am sure my ears were red when he told me the number. It was soon after this, without ever having mastered my poker face and without every developing the ability to negotiate I realized I must have arrived at a point where I was being paid the same as my male peers.

Over the weeks following my decision to stay with the firm, I heard quite confidentially from each of my male peers, that much to their amazement they had been given a 15% raise without any negotiation and for no apparent reason.  I was left with two possible explanations for this.

Perhaps my firm’s all-male executive leadership felt truly committed to “pay equality” for men and women and had, after bumping up my already solid base by 15%, wanted to ensure the men were making the same.

Or maybe they were committed to maintaining a “Gender Pay” Spread.