News this week from Harvard Daily Stat has confirmed my opinion that there's no place for being sensible when it comes to negotiating your salary!  In this study, job candidates who jokingly requested ridiculously high salaries received 9% higher wage offers than candidates who made no such jokes, according to a simulation conducted by Todd J. Thorsteinson of the University of Idaho.  Read More

We need to talk about recruitment. Specifically it seems we need to talk about recruiting women into key leadership roles, because still I keep hearing there aren’t enough suitable women out there.  So who makes this assessment anyway?  The recruiters? Business leaders? The women? Read More

By now you’ve probably seen the Sheryl Sandberg video from TEDwomen, and her 3 tips for making it to the C-suite.  As COO of Facebook, Sandberg has achieved dizzying heights of career success.  Her advice to other women seeking to do the same is as personal as it is practical, yet also acknowledges the social, biological and self-imposed obstacles that women face in defining their own career paths.  In a nutshell, she suggests that women increase their likelihood of success when they: Read More

Women may be perpetuating the gender pay gap through their attitudes towards asking for money, according to a survey of 250 men and women conducted by authors of Sheconomics, a book that examines women and their attitudes towards managing money.  The survey - conducted earlier this year - found that women are two and a half times more likely than men to find pay negotiating humiliating, and that men would rather ask another male for money - and women would too.  Other survey findings include: Read More

If you’ve ever been responsible for establishing employee development programs, conferences or leadership offsites, you’ll know just difficult it can be to find fantastic, out of this world, leading-edge service providers.  In a sea of social media and spin, my vast network send me calls for help every day – by email, LinkedIn, twitter and the sphinxx website - all looking for advice about who they should hire for their own professional development needs, or to supplement their in-house women's programs. Read More

Now that we are seeing more people change jobs I’m consistently asked for salary negotiation advice: something near and dear to my heart, because it can be the source of much mis-understanding, frustration and disappointment on the part of the employee.  There is nothing worse than starting a new job feeling as though you are being underpaid.  This issue is especially prevalent for women.  We have a hard time asking for what we deserve and backing ourselves when challenged.   Read More

I sent a copy of this article out to our sphinxx members at the beginning of the year, but I honestly think it should be read by all working women so I have decided to post a link to it here. Women lose money when they don’t negotiate. But what are the costs? Whitney Johnson explores a range of studies that find women can be socially and financially remonstrated for daring to negotiate.  Read More

You’d think that fear wouldn’t be a helpful emotion to have swimming around your head when asking for a raise. But new research by Heajung Jun and Maia Young at UCLA and Christopher Bauman at the University of Washington suggests exactly the opposite, that being scared can boost a woman’s effectiveness at negotiating a pay increase. Unfortunately, fear doesn’t work so well for men when negotiating.

Why? Well their hypothesis is that men react to fear with a “fight or flight response”, whereas women in their study operated with a “tend or befriend” response. Therefore men were likely to avoid engaging in negotiations when scared, unlike women who sought to affiliate themselves with their interviewer/manager so they didn’t face the stress on their own.

Get the full article reporting these findings - courtesy of Jeanette Marshall who shared it on our LinkedIn group.

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The Equal Pay Alliance has made 2010 the year for real action on the pay gap for working women. The Equal Pay Alliance is made up of 150 representatives from government, unions (including the Australian Council of Trade Unions) and businesses.

And I am delighted to pass on that the campaign has kicked off with the Australian Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Elizabeth Broderick announcing that the Australian Services Union is aiming to increase the wages of almost 250,000 mostly female workers in the community sector. The ASU claims that low wages in the community sector should be raised to a comparable rate to similar industries that aren’t made up of mainly female workers.

For more information click here for the Get Networking blog reporting on this exciting development. This is the first step in a potentially very exciting revolution for us women in business with the significant pay gaps exist, and women in everywhere. Read More

A few weeks ago I answered a question on LinkedIn about what the world would look like if the pay gap between men and women didn’t exist. Since then, snippets of my answer have been popping up in blogs and articles all over the place. I’m just one of several quoted in each article, so lets keep raising this issue because its beginning to getting the attention it deserves. Read More