The Christmas season is also survey season. As our minds and our wallets turn to pleasure buying the financial service firms will survey anything and anyone in bid to get their names in the papers and divert some of the wall of Christmas cash out of the shops and into their products.
So insurance companies remind us that you only have to leave a toddler alone for 30 seconds before he starts doing untold damage to your furniture. Motoring organizations tell us the precise percentage of drivers who break down (with no breakdown cover!) on their way to their in-laws on Christmas Eve. Medical lobbying groups tot up the number of binge-drinking related accidents on New Year’s Eve and banks point out the average cost of Christmas borrowing to those who have the wrong brand of personal loan or credit card. It’s all very boring, very predictable and utterly useless information.
But among the piles of dross this year there was one fascinating survey. It came from Woolworths and pointed out that on average parents spend just under £100 more on presents for their sons than for their daughters every Christmas. I imagine the point was to force guilt-ridden parents back to the shops to pick up few more Bratz Babyz dolls for the girls but that wasn’t the thing that really caught my attention.
Instead the interesting bit was the reason parents gave for their favoritism: boys ask for more presents, the presents they ask for tend to be more expensive (the most expensive of the toys that made it into the top five for girls this Christmas was the Amazing Amanda doll at £69.99, for boys it was the Playstation Portable at £179.99), and they get nastier than girls if they don’t get what they want.
There’s a clear lesson here; if you don’t ask you don’t get. But it’s a lesson that women never seem to learn. They get stuck with cheap dolls when they’re nine and – for the exact same reason – they get stuck with rubbish salaries when they’re 29.
A few years ago Linda Babcock, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the US, noticed that year after year the starting salaries of the men that graduated from her classes was higher than that of the women – to the tune of around 7%.
This confused her – they all left with similar qualifications and went into similar jobs. So she investigated. It turned out that the majority of the women, thrilled to be considered worthy of the jobs, had accepted the starting salaries they had been offered. The men had not. They had asked for more and negotiated the salary up – by an average of 7.4%. This doesn’t sound like much, but over the years it really adds up.
Imagine that a man and a woman both get offered a job at the same time at the same place. The offer includes a starting salary of £25,000. The woman takes it. The man negotiates it up to £28,000. Thereafter they both get 5% pay rises every year over the next 30 years or so. How much more do you think he will earn over his career than she does?
The answer is a shocking 285,000 pounds, more than most people’s entire net worth by retirement. And that’s a minimum number: if the woman accepts the 5% every year but the man will push it up a little more at each of his annual reviews (men, says Babcock, initiate negotiations four times as often as women do) he’ll end up with even more.
The final result in the UK is that women who work full time are paid 18% less than men who work full time and women who work part time are paid a horrible 40% less than men.
I’m not suggesting that there aren’t other factors at work here. Of course there are. Women tend to leave the workforce for large periods of time to have and bring up babies and this stops them moving into senior positions for example. They also tend to go into low paid sectors such as retailing.
But the most important factor in the lower salaries of women is not babies, and not the sectors women work in but the fact that they don’t, that they won’t, ask for higher salaries. For proof look no further than the fact that even before the babies start arriving women are paid less than men: according to the Equal Opportunities Commission only five years after graduation the difference between the wages of equally educated men and women is 15%.
There are a plenty of theories about as to why women can’t bring themselves to ask for the same amount of money as men. But in the end it seems to come down to a different method of self-measurement. Women assume that, if they were worth more, their boss would pay them more so they don’t ask. To do so would be embarrassing – it would be to suggest that work and the relationships formed at work are not satisfying in themselves but that they have a set monetary value.
Men are different. They don’t need to be loved by their colleagues or their bosses and they don’t feel lucky to be allowed to work, they are clear about the fact that they work mainly for money so they take a view on what they are worth and insist on having it. They ask more so they get more.
For the next few weeks the papers are going to be full of money saving tips and suggestions about how to make 2006 a richer one than 2005. But most women would do better to ignore all the claptrap about how to find the right bargains in the sales and make themselves richer in one simple way: ask for more money. Because quite clearly if you don’t ask for something- be it for toys or for money – you won’t get it.