Wage Gap on Shine

Have you experienced the "motherhood penalty"?

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We know there is still work to do to close the wage gap between women and men. But researchers at Cornell University say there is another gap to close between two groups of women--mothers and their peers without children. They call it the "motherhood penalty" because they found through an experimental study that if two women with similar experience and skills apply for a job, the one who is a mother is less likely to get it.

12 tips for women to negotiate higher salaries -- even in tough economic times

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A study of 42,000 managers in the UK found that at the age of 37, the average female manager was five years younger than her male equivalent. Despite those significant gains, women continue to be paid less-- an average 12 per cent less for working in a similar role. At the director level the gap increases to 23 per cent. The National Management Salary Survey also reveals that resignation rates among women directors, managers and professionals are at their highest level for five years. Women are 20 per cent more likely than men to resign from their jobs. Those statistics would not be much different for women working in the United States.

As these statistics show, regardless of how far you progress, your compensation depends in significant part on how well you negotiate.

Gains by girls do not come at the expense of boys when both grow up: Men still earn more than women in the workforce

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Remember the report that said girls were being shortchanged in the classroom, which led to more attention paid to how girls learn and how they are treated in the classroom, which led to a backlash of studies showing that boys are actually falling behind in the classroom at the expense of girls?

That original report came from the American Association of Women in 1992. Sixteen years later the AAUW is back with more research supporting other findings that say even though for years girls have been graduating from high school and college at a higher rate than boys, boys have not been hurt by the steady march of achievement by girls. As Tamar Lewin writes in this New York Times article on the research, the report notes that "perhaps the most compelling evidence against the existence of a boys' crisis is that men continue to outearn women in the workplace."