Stop Blaming Women for the #PayGap

Not our fault

It’s a matter of principle here at She Negotiates that there’s nothing wrong with women in the workforce other than its failure to value our unique contributions to it.

Need proof? As a study by Barclay’s in the UK concluded,

Women entrepreneurs out earn their male peers by 14%.

Unsurprisingly, most of the commentary following this report focused more on women’s failure to negotiate equal pay for themselves in the workplace rather than on their entrepreneurial successes. Nary a mention was made about the subtle everyday sexism that keeps low pay in place and promotional opportunities out of reach.

Grrrrrr.

Listen. These results have nothing whatsoever to do with - and prove nothing about - women's reticence in asking for equal treatment, particularly given the fact that we’ve been asking, nay, DEMANDING, equal treatment for fifty years. Despite the fact that California, for instance, has had an equal pay law in place since 1949! That Act prohibits employers from:

pay[ing] any individual in the employer's employ at wage rates less than the rates paid to employees of the opposite sex in the same establishment for equal work on jobs.

A lot of good that did us.

Why We Do Better in Our Own Shops

I always pick the shortest explanation between two points. And, of course, I see workplace issues through a historic cultural lens as well as the lens of my own work experience beginning in 1970 and more or less culminating in 1980 when I joined the California State Bar Association and began appearing in Court, negotiating the settlement of lawsuits and engaging in other lawyer-like activities that were still deemed to be more suitable for men.

We do better in our own enterprises because the rewards of entrepreneurism are not driven by out-dated historic male metrics for success. They are driven by results.

Women entrepreneurs reverse the pay gap because we’re so used to being dismissed, side-lined and under compensated that we work harder, ignore failure and persevere. The pundits, predictably, cited women’s tendency to ignore failure as an explanation our lack of success because, they assumed, we don’t learn from it. This conclusion from a study saying that women, unimpeded by implicit bias, succeed more than their male peers!

Grrrr.

Listen, if you’ve perfected the recipe for a new addictive cookie, opened your own restaurant or invented a coronavirus vaccine, there’s no gendered metric of success. The metric is sales and solutions, not "executive presence" or subjective, inherently biased. perceptions of ability in a male-dominated, historically male-structured workplace.

In light of all this, I just want to ask for one thing. When we see and article purportedly about women’s success that devolves into a critique of “our” failure to achieve equal pay, cast a skeptical eye on the reporting. Let’s stop feeling bad about ourselves for our “failure” to ask for equal pay, equal resources, equal access to clients, equal credit for business development or equal educational and promotional opportunities.

It’s not our fault. It is the water we swim in.

too many of us have been swatted down like a dickens’ orpahn

Oliver, Oliver Never before has a boy wanted more. He will rue the day somebody named him Ol-i-ver.

There are ample reasons for women not to ask for more money, more human and material resources, and better working conditions. Because the workplace was structured for men long before we even had the right to vote. And because we’ve been socialized not to ask for anything for ourselves.

Fortunately, we here at She Negotiates have a proven way to seek greater compensation, more promotional opportunities and better working conditions without gender blowback. But while you’re waiting to read more about that, please, please stop blaming yourself for not being “good enough” or “brave enough” to do what fifty years of legislation has failed to do - guarantee women equal pay.

Instead of letting the workplace culture make you feel bad about yourself, let it, along with the still dispiriting pay gap, move you to greater action. Recall the wisdom of Audre Lorde who noted that pain is important because it moves us to evade it rather than succumb to it, impels us to deal with it rather than ignore it and eventually allows us, and our sisters, to transcend it.

Go get ‘em champs. Just because the world wasn’t delivered to us as our oyster, we can, together, still make it so.