A former student of a colleague was coming back to visit and brought some great news. He had landed a big fancy-named fellowship and a job offer. He started asking me questions that one has when put into a new situation – a rare situation – negotiations. He was at the negotiations stage. This is something that you don’t get to do very often, and thus, none of us are all that practiced at it. I have had a couple older posts about negotiating (Everything and Practice and StartUp).
One of the interesting things I noticed was that this student had not received much help from his advisors about how to go about the job search nor about negotiations. As I kept giving him advice on this and that, much of which was covered in the previous posts, he was very enthusiastically eating it up. It felt good to mentor this student to whom I thought I could have offered nothing.
As I was recently traveling, I had many conversations with other WomenOfScience that I do not usually get to interact with. One was a woman who did a particularly spectacular job at negotiating her first position, so we discussed some tactics and of negotiation. Although she negotiated everything from salary to office furniture, she warned against looking greedy and being too picky. She suggested that one strategy is to prioritize your request list. For instance, equipment for your experiments is likely to be crucial. Money for people is probably essential.
As I think back on my own original negotiations, I know I did things wrong the first time. I was very bad at negotiating my salary. I knew it was important, but I felt like I was negotiating my husband’s salary and his whole job, and I shouldn’t look too greedy (see previous post on solving the Two-Body Problem). I think not negotiating my salary at all was a mistake. Even starting a few $1000 ahead would have been better. I think this is very typical for women. Further, society tells us that women who ask for more money (even equal pay) are greedy and that is somehow less tolerable in women than in men. Men who ask for more money are not as likely to be thought of as greedy. There is some advice I have heard recently that I think is good to help overcome this: When you need to negotiate for more money – don’t think you are negotiating it for yourself, but rather for your family. You need more money so that your family has a better life. I think that would have helped me. Your salary is for your family to make sure they can live comfortably while you are busting your hump getting tenure – make sure you frame it that way in your mind.
I didn’t have any trouble negotiating for what I needed for my lab, because it was, in effect, not just for me, but also for the department and the lab, which is bigger than just me. If I could have framed some of the other aspects – salary and other personal needs – in a bigger context, I think I would have been more successful negotiating for those things.
What do you think? Any advice or suggestions to help others negotiate better? Post or comment. To get emails whenever I post, push the +Follow button.
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Comments on: "Negotiations" (2)
When I was negotiating my position, I was told that there was no negotiation on salary, and that “elite liberal arts university” used a very egalitarian method to calculate a salary based upon number of postdoctoral years. I and a couple of my fellow female colleagues took this to be true, and focused our negotiations on other variables. We have since found out some of our male junior faculty successful negotiated a higher starting salary. This of course makes us feel naive and deceived. Lesson, if it is important, push back, there is always room for negotiation.
[…] Second, we have discussed many of the big work-life issues on this blog. For example: When should you have kids (see these blog posts: flexibility, grad school, pre/post tenure, postdoc)? Should you take a job when you don’t have one for your spouse (see our posts on two-body problems: problems, surprise, negotiations)? […]