The Art of Negotiating
July 31st, 2007 at 01:46pm Rebecca Borden
Researchers, like Linda Babock, have found that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations. The American Association of University Women released a study in April 2007 shows that the pay gap for women starts at around 80% out of college but widens to 69% after ten years. On Monday July 30, the Washington Post/MSNBC profiled new study, published by the Kennedy School of Government, Â that found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations.
“It is not that women always act one way and men act another way; it tends to be moderated by situational factors,” Bowles said. “The point of this paper is: Yes, there is an economic rationale to negotiate, but you have to weigh that against social risks of negotiating. What we show is those risks are higher for women than for men.”
Given that the workforce of our arts & cultural sector is predominantly female and we work with an abudance of scare resources, are we perhaps more conditioned not to ask for more? Or, do arts professionals view negotiation (in all its forms and manifestations) differently? Or maybe by placing the arts at the core of our work, we approach the construction of “value” quite differently?
Care to share some negotiating tips for the common good?
