The $tart $mart Salary Workshop will help young professionals learn to negotiate their salaries in a world with a wage gap.
When it comes to negotiating a salary, many Americans aren't as confident as when they're bargaining for houses or cars, Roxanne Malé-Brune, director of grant development and projects for the Vice President of Research, said.
“For most Americans, we think ‘Oh God, do I have to?’ ” Malé-Brune said. “We don’t get a lot of practice and a lot of people come into the situation and they are totally unprepared … and then all they want to do is leave and that is not good for the employee and it is not good for the employer.”
The workshop, which is created by the American Association of University Women, an organization meant to empower women and girls, teaches women to articulate their value in the workplace and to build their confidence in doing negotiations, among many other lessons.
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Malé-Brune is no longer the director of the $tart $mart Salary Negotiation Workshop, a program she played an important role in bringing to Ohio University. M. Geneva Murray, director of the Women’s Center, took over as the organizer for the event’s fourth year.
“This workshop is a time to address some of these issues that we have that are traditionally not taught,” Murray said.
Murray said it is important to recognize the discrepancies of not only the wage gap of women making 79 cents to a man’s dollar, but also to realize that other minorities are being affected and have an even larger gap because of race and ethnicity.
Murray said women are usually apologetic and do not have confidence when asking for a raise, even if they carry skills that will enhance the company.
Cami Jones, a junior studying industrial and systems engineering, said the workshop should be inclusive instead of just focusing on the wage gap and how women can learn to change it.
“For those kind of events and topics in general, I think it kind of does itself a disservice when it is just targeted at the underrepresented group,” Jones said. “Instead of saying, ‘Well, we feel like you are not equal right now so we are going to try to raise you up,’ I think that’s good, but it still acknowledges that there is inequality instead of just trying to make it equal.”
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Even though the workshop may have a gender component to it, Murray said it is relevant to everyone.
“The workshop will provide good tools in which participants can determine what the salary range is for the jobs that they are looking for in the areas that they are looking and how they can position themselves within that range,” Murray said.
Malé-Brune said data shows that how a person negotiates salaries, even for the first job, will impact how much money a person will make over his or her entire career.
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