What a collaborative, feminist, and fun experience to do a webinar with the terrific team of YaleWomen! During the drive from New Jersey to New Haven with my husband, Hal Strelnick ’75 MD, I fondly remembered that my first gig teaching Sex Discrimination Law was 30 years ago at Yale – for a Davenport College residential seminar!

 

So much has improved for women since then . . . but we still face discrimination.

 

Almost everyone – whether they call themselves feminist or not – believes in equal pay for men and women. Yet the wage gap persists. At the current rate of improvement, it will take 152 years to achieve pay parity. And because new salaries are often determined by past ones, the differential grows throughout a career to be $500,000 or more in lost wages.

 

Instead of teaching about pay inequity, I want to end it. So I’m thrilled about the economic research that shows individual women who negotiate for salary and other benefits can succeed.

 

And yet women’s reluctance to negotiate is justified, for even in 2017, women often have to walk a fine line between being assertive, but not too assertive. I hope the Salary Negotiation webinar demystified the process and gave women alums valuable tips to make negotiation easy and successful, whether for a higher salary, a better title, or a flexible schedule.

 

It was an honor to return to the Yale campus to “mentor” hundreds of YaleWomen through our bi-coastal webinar!

 

 

If you would like to connect with Deb about other training opportunities, you can contact her at [email protected]. If you were unable to participate in the live webinar, you can access it here: Salary Negotiation.  To view YaleWomen’s earlier webinars, click here “Confidence When it Counts: Rise Above Self Criticism and Bias” (June 2016) and “Women in Politics” (October 2016).