Why are women paid less?
In my sister Julie Des Jardins’s book, The Madame Curie Complex, she tells the story of Rosalind Franklin — a hero to many women scientists…
In my sister Julie Des Jardins’s book, The Madame Curie Complex, she tells the story of Rosalind Franklin — a hero to many women scientists but a largely unknown figure to the mainstream — the scientist whose early work led to the discovery of the Double Helix — the structure of DNA.
As my sister explains, Franklin actually developed early data supporting the Double Helix structure we all grew up learning about in school. We also learned in school that the scientists who were credited for this discovery with a Nobel Prize were Francis Crick, James Watson, and Franklin’s colleague Maurice Wilkins. Without Franklin’s consent Wilkins shared with Watson and Crick an image Franklin had produced that supported the double-helix structure. This image arguably led to later confirmation of the Double Helix Theory.
It’s not clear if Franklin would have been credited along with Watson, Crick, and Wilkins had she lived; she died from ovarian cancer years before the Nobel prize was awarded, at the age of 37. Before her death, Franklin was still trying to prove the validity of her work. Watson, Wilkins, and Crick, however, had no concerns about building off of her incomplete research.
This story has caused me to think a lot about my own contributions in this world. How many of them, big or small, did I dismiss because they didn’t meet a standard I had set? How is this tendency toward perfection affecting the way women are credited, or compensated for their work?
Until we address both men’s and women’s beliefs on the issue of equal compensation and credit, it will continue in the work world, with potentially historic outcomes.
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Before co-founding BlogHer, I thought very little about pay or the status of women in companies. Rather, I thought a lot about MY status in companies. How could I improve MY lot? In response to this question I subconsciously asked myself, I worked — to excess. And I quit jobs that were not providing growth potential. Numerous times, I worked for myself, thinking that I would be happiest not competing with anyone for internal acknowledgement.
But was my movement in and out of corporate environments driven by any downward pressure experienced because I was female? No. At nearly all of the companies where I worked a woman was in a senior role, if not in the top leadership position; I had leadership role models. What I lacked was a life model — someone who had worked with a large degree of autonomy, leveraging the corporate world when necessary but ultimately following a career path entirely of her own making. BlogHer was not a response to raising women’s status online so much as it was a way to make a living doing what I loved.
When I and my co-founders decided to move forward with growing that business with venture capital, we had a challenging but relatively smooth fundraising process, facilitated by the early fruits of our work and having revenue and major brand support already in place.
Other women asked me: Was it hard getting your first round of funding? I suspected they asked because they know that 2% of women-owned companies are VC-backed. I had to honestly respond, “No.”
I’ve sat on panels with other women business leaders where we all agreed in advance, no trash-talking men or the male-dominated tech industry. I believe the thinking was, we all got where we got through hard work, and we should inspire other women, not make them question whether they will ever have a chance at a seat at the table. It seemed unnecessary for me to trash talk; after all, I had received multiple rounds of funding through predominantly male VCs who saw strong business opportunity in our mission-based, female-serving, digital media play.
Any shortcomings I’ve had in my career have always seemed to me the result of my own choices: My choice to not attend business school, my choice to leave the corporate world at numerous junctures rather than tough it out and determine once and for all whether my abilities would merit a top leadership position. I can’t say I was passed over — ever — let alone passed over for a male colleague.
So then, why now am I so motivated to empower women to lead within their own organizations — be they seed-stage startups or Fortune 500 corporations? Where did I start to see the need to enforce change? The inequities? There are several reasons:
1. Women I respect have shared their experiences with me; stories of not getting their due in a company — and I don’t believe they are liars.
2. I suspect that I have experienced gender bias, only in more subversive ways.
Having worked at a startup I co-founded with two other women, I was, perhaps, shielded from outright unfairness. It was our mission to help women get paid and get credit for their influence online. We had a Herculean task of opening a market to female influencers, but that market was already convinced of their consumer power. Our bigger challenge initially was enabling the community to feel empowered monetizing their influence, something that some women struggled with, thinking that they were selling out by getting paid by advertisers to do what they loved — create content.
And our challenge was to decode the notion of worth. It wasn’t uncommon in our early days of starting the company to learn that some women who had writing “jobs” with major brands and were not actually paid for their work. On another end of the spectrum we received complaints from bloggers who felt they weren’t being paid as much as such and such. In reality, bloggers were paid according to their suitability of content for an advertiser (parenting and food were higher-yielding categories; we had more demand here) and audience reach. So of course some bloggers were paid more.
…our challenge was to decode the notion of worth
Some bloggers were founding members of the network and so established that advertisers requested them by name. We offered these bloggers a higher revenue share. And therein lay the problem: Now there was a differential in worth. Impression for impression these bloggers were getting paid more. And that upset some bloggers: Shouldn’t we all have the same rates?
The answer to this, we determined, was no. But we needed to create a mechanism of transparency so that bloggers who weren’t paid this tier rate understood why, and we created a criteria for how you could also achieve this degree of status.
We offered a pathway to more opportunities by actively introducing lesser-known influencers to advertisers looking for that breakaway talent. And we got her paid while working her way to superstardom
These are key distinctions — transparency and access — that make our situation different from that in other organizations. At Salesforce.com for example, female execs discovered women at the organization were making less than the men who held the same titles. Now that light has been shed on the inequity, women’s salaries are being brought to par with men who hold similar roles.
We could all argue about how this happened. Perhaps these women asked for less when they were just out of college, or didn’t request more when the recruiting officer said, “this is what we’re paying for this position” and then entered a career spiral of pay inequality. Perhaps she was never offered the same compensation as a man. I applaud the attempts to now do right by women at Salesforce.com; but I am still discouraged by how all of this happened, likely before women started working there, and perhaps in subconscious collusion.
You may have heard of this study dozens of times like I have: When women and men in the same role are asked to describe their capabilities the men tend to overstate their value, selling into a higher position, and women will talk more about what they lack, resulting in less opportunity for promotion. I’ll bet you, though, that many women, if asked to share what she thought she should be paid, would ask for significantly less than a man. We may both have an similar, inherent notion of the value of our work, but women will by nature anticipate we need to do more to earn that amount and prove ourselves worthy of that number while men will ask for more than they believe their talent is worth and be OK with being overvalued if that request is made. Only he doesn’t ever really feel overvalued, as his worth in his mind is exactly what someone agreed to pay.
…his worth in his mind is exactly what someone agreed to pay.
What a liberating way of being.
I’ve spoken to women who tell me, “I would have no problem asking for as much as a man,” but if she doesn’t know what a man has negotiated and must provide her own assessment of what she should be paid, she will go lower.
And equally-compensated women experience inequality by, in essence, having to pay for equality. I’ve seen additional tasks outside the realm of a woman’s job tucked in with her other responsibilities, “This is what she makes the big bucks for,” the thinking goes. But a well-paid man would not be asked to do these things: “He’s too far up on the pay scale to be handling those details,” the thinking goes. “Those tasks should be delegated.”
These are things I’ve noticed over time. I wonder, if I were to wear some magic helmet of truth and walk through my past, if I would see how much money and opportunity I pissed away by not questioning, or by thinking that I didn’t need to question. Or how many months/years off my life I would have saved myself if I didn’t feel I had to overachieve an outcome. Or, if by being at a company that was comprised of mostly women, I dismissed the notion of inherent unfairness because I didn’t realize the differential in worth present in our minds.
And, I believe that women are also complicit in this bias, believing, as Rosalind Franklin did, that what she conceived, as grand and monumental as it was, was inherently incomplete.