Fast Tracking Equity At Your Job

This is a guest post from Betty Márquez Rosales, a journalist and media consultant for She Negotiates. A recent graduate of the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, she reports on education, gender, and health. You may remember her post from early June on graduating into a pandemic.

Image by Rachel B. Gorban.

“When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.”

It's from The Notorious RBG (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of course). While most of us will never sit on the Supreme Court, we will likely experience being one of the few women in positions of power in our workplace. You might currently be the only one.

You're here reading this newsletter because you have goals you know you deserve to reach.

You're also likely surrounded by other women who feel the same way. Maybe you're already goal-setting with them. Perhaps they are only just beginning to have that feeling that tells them they're being lowballed and underpaid.

None of us have reached our unique goals without some form of guidance. So how do we use our knowledge to make sure other women are beside us at the leadership table?

If you know an intern, fellow, or any colleague is on track to be hired or promoted, share salary information with them.

Think back to when you started at your current job or in your career, and imagine the possibilities if your younger self had the knowledge you have today. How much more could you have earned since then? What position might you have earned sooner in your career? What more could you have attained professionally?

Be the person you wish you had in your life when you were starting. 

Share your negotiation strategies.

Have you ever received negotiation advice? If you’re here, the answer is yes. Share that knowledge with your colleagues and friends, or refer them for a consultation.

Here's a great example of this: Not long ago, the name of a past She Negotiates client came up. She wasn't looking for a negotiation call for herself - she had already been promoted to the position and salary she wanted at the time.

But she was in the process of hiring someone and she did what we hope happens far more often: she referred her new employee to She Negotiates so that the young woman could learn how to negotiate her new salary.

Rather than let her potentially leave the negotiation table with a salary lower than she deserved, the past client set up her new employee for success not only in that position but also in her career.

If you're in the position to hire someone, or if you know someone in the job-hunting process, we have a list of allies we know can offer career-changing advice on a variety of workplace-related topics. Or, if your friend or colleague would rather first do some research on their own, here’s this page full of free resources.

Click here to see our consult packages (and there's a new one for women who identify as BIPOC).

We don’t know what we don’t know.

We all want our younger or less experienced colleagues to take the initiative and reach out with questions they may have. But not everyone knows how to network and not everyone knows who to go to with questions. They may not know what questions to ask or that they must negotiate to earn the income they deserve.

Make it a point to reach out to a colleague who looks like they could use a little guidance, and offer some of the knowledge you wish someone had shared with you earlier in your career.

If you’re up for it, you could organize some of your female colleagues into a workplace support group where you’re able to discuss, vent, and strategize together. 

Progress in the workplace cannot occur at the slow pace of one person at a time. We can get much further if we come together, if we refer each other, and if we build up each other. 

If after reading this you’re still unsure about how to build solidarity amongst the women in your life, ask yourself this: Am I thinking about a specific person right now? Start there and reach out to them.