One of the first things that students learn in any course that discusses gender disparities in the workplace is that on average, women earn less money than men, even after controlling for qualifications, years of experience, occupation, etc. -- about 11% less than men. There are many different sociological factors for this inequality, but the Washington Post has an article that highlights one that doesn’t get a lot of attention -- women are less likely to negotiate for a higher salary, partly because they are more likely to be looked down upon than men who do the same thing:

The traditional explanation for the gender differences that Babcock found is that men are simply more aggressive than women, perhaps because of a combination of genetics and upbringing. The solution to gender disparities, this school of thought suggests, is to train women to be more assertive and to ask for more. However, a new set of experiments . . . offers an entirely different explanation.

A new study . . . found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women’s reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more -- the perception was that women who asked for more were “less nice".

So in other words, women entering the workforce are frequently faced with a no-win scenario: they can stay quiet, not negotiate, and accept a lower starting salary than their male coworkers and have that initial disadvantage accumulate over the years in the form of lower total earnings, or they can be assertive and negotiate a higher starting salary but then suffer the “social penalty” of being judged as pushy or arrogant.

Yes, the gender double standard unfortunately still exists. I’m also pretty confident that the same pattern also exists for workers of color, many of whom are also likely to be offered a lower starting salary than their White counterparts but also face the same dilemma of either negotiating and being judged, or not negotiating and starting the cycle of inequality all over again.

This pattern, whether it exists for women or workers of color, is another example of the insidious nature of discrimination -- it doesn’t necessarily result from a single person who purposely decides to favor one group over another, but rather is the result of a convergence of different subtle prejudices that combine and accumulate over the years, leading to a pattern of behavior and expectations that favors one group over another.