There is a lot of discussion about how women earn $0.77 for every $1.00 men earn. In the short media sound bite clips we are led to believe that this is primarily due to wage discrimination and women being poor wage/salary negotiators. This is misleading. This is not to say wage discrimination doesn’t exist or that I don’t have personal experience with significant wage discrimination. However, I will hope most women will do like I did, ask questions, get the facts, state my case and get it corrected. 
One of the principle reasons women earn less than men is due to career/job selection and not understanding the value of the job.
Our workplaces exist to make money. In most workplaces the best paying jobs are those that directly impact how much money our workplace makes. Being able to state in tangible terms how your actions impacted the bottom is the best justification for negotiating more money.
For example, anyone in sales or business development brings in new customers, clients and work. They should be able to equate how their actions impacted revenue.
Most of our jobs have one degree of separation from money. We have metrics and we intuitively understand how those metrics equate to money.
- An HR professional reduced annual turnover from 24% annually to 8% annually in two years.
- A Safety professional reduced lost time incident rate from 1.3 to 0.95 in one year.
- A Quality professional reduced defects from 12 per 100 units to 0.4 per 100 units.
- A construction superintendent completed the project 6 weeks ahead of target schedule and four months ahead of contract schedule.
- A programmer was part of a team that got the new software to market 6 months early.
- A payroll clerk suggested a new timesheet reporting process and reduced the time to enter payroll by 2 hours per week.
When we understand how our actions impact the performance of our workplace, we know our value. When we know our value we want to be paid what we are worth. In one of my workplaces, I was able to show how a project administrator was worth double her current salary and had a greater impact on the bottom line than some project managers. While she didn’t get her salary doubled, she did get a significant raise.
I’ve done this with other women too. I was asked to cut the salary and benefits of one of my female employees until I showed the nearly $1 million she personally added to the bottom line. I justified several raises for another woman after she corrected several problem areas and saved the workplace $1.7 million dollars. And I justified a 15% raise for yet another woman after I documented how she out-performed all of her male peers.
It all comes down to dollars and cents. All women need to think of themselves as businesswomen, no matter what role they are in. They provide a service by doing work. The workplace pays them for their services. It is a transaction. As the value of the services a woman provides increases then what the workplace pays her for those services increases. Women can’t believe the workplace is entitled to freebies.
And if the workplace is unwilling to pay fair value for a woman’s work, then she is free to look for an employer who will. As businesswomen we should always be looking for the best return to maximize our personal bottom line.
Empowered Women Know Their Value
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