Our $560,000 Mistake

What does half a mil buy these days? A three-bedroom house in New Jersey, college tuition for a couple of kids in a couple of decades, peace of mind in the 401(k). All things a working woman could use.

And yet, working women are routinely tossing $560,000 away. We're doing so by not uttering one all-important sentence during one all-important event. Upon being hired for our first jobs, we're not saying: "Now, can we negotiate my salary?"

The price we pay over the course of our careers by not negotiating our starting salaries: $560,000.

That staggering figure comes up in "The Wage Gap for Women" on Alternet, which in turn quotes the research of Linda Babcock at Carnegie Mellon University. Here's a passage from the article:

A study of master's-degree candidates at Carnegie Mellon University by economist Linda Babcock found that only 7 percent of first-job-seeking women negotiated their salary, as opposed to 57 percent of men. There was no small consequence to this failure to negotiate. In their book Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton University Press, 2003), Babcock and co-author Sara Laschever found that candidates who negotiated increased their starting salaries by 7.4 percent (about $4,000), and that the starting salaries of males averaged 7.6 percent higher than the females'.

Babcock calculated that failing to negotiate for a first salary can lead to an overall loss of over $560,000 by age 60. That comprises a good chunk of the estimated overall wage gap between men and women--further exacerbated by such other forms of gender discrimination as mommy tracking and sexual harassment--which Brandeis University Women's Studies Research Center resident scholar Evelyn Murphy projects (using U.S. Census figures) costs women between $700,000 and $2 million over the course of a career.

So buck up and ask. That three-bedroom house is at stake.