Crush Your Own Pay Gap Now!

There are dozens of ways to measure the gender pay gap and the linked video from the Pew Research Center explains just one of them.

We at She Negotiates believe that part of this progress is due to women bravely facing down their own wage disparity and doing something about it by learning how to negotiate raises, bonuses, equity interest in their organizations and the like.

Still, we have bitter facts to swallow, including

• the highest paid public employee in nearly every state being a football coach (chart courtesy of Deadspin here).

• With all due respect to guys throwing themselves bodily at one another while trying to move a spherical object a few dozen yards, you couldn't say these compensation statistics bear any rational relationship to value created for the country and certainly not to the human race (I'll expect serious blowback on this)
• teachers, into whose hands we have entrusted the survival of the species, long a woman's profession, continue to receive rock bottom pay for college graduates. According to the Economic Policy Institute, teachers earned $116 less per week in 2002, a wage disadvantage of 12.2%. Because teachers worked more hours per week, the hourly wage disadvantage was an even larger 14.1%)
• According to the National Women's Law Center, nearly six in ten poor adults are women, and nearly six in ten poor children live in families headed by women. Poverty rates are especially high for single mothers, women of color, and elderly women living alone.

Not everyone, of course, is economically well-enough placed to negotiate an end to her own personal wage gap and that is particularly true for low income women. As CBS recently reported,

The discussion about raising the minimum wage is also increasingly centering on gender, given that the majority of the lowest-paid earners are women, at about 55 percent. When it comes to tipped workers -- who are only guaranteed $2.13 an hour -- the imbalance is even greater, with women constituting 73 percent of workers who depend on tips.

For those of us who can say something about what we should be paid, it's critical, vital to the well-being of our families and our country, to negotiate a market value raise, closing the wage gap for as many women as we can reach and teach.

With that in mind, I've been creating easy-to-follow info graphics to help women (and men!) negotiate their way out of the economic hole most of us have been laboring in since the Great Unpleasantness of 2008.

Please read. Learn. Do.