Negotiating salary can be a scary prospect, with many hopeful employees often feeling happy enough just to be close to getting the job. Our minds can play tricks on us: what if by trying to negotiate my salary, they conclude I’m too pushy and decide against hiring me? What if I’m not asking for enough, or asking for too much? We asked employees, “Did you negotiate your salary?”
The information comes from the latest reading of an ongoing study by Comparably.
Men feel more comfortable playing the negotiation game with their employers than women. Alternately, it’s possible that women negotiate just as much but are less often successful. Either way, these numbers are another indication that males have comfortably dominated the U.S. workforce for decades.
Caucasians, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and members of the “Other” designation all say they negotiated their salary at near the rate of overall male respondents. Less successful are Hispanic/Latinos, who were only slightly higher in terms of positive responses than overall female employees, and African-Americans, who had the lowest positive responses of any ethnicity.
Executives are understandably the most confident set of employees, with more than 2/3rds saying they had negotiated their salaries. Way down on the other end of the scale are workers in Admin and Customer Support, less than 1/3rd of whom could say the same.
An upward trend occurs with advancing age, implying that workers become more confident the longer they’ve been in the workforce, and therefore more likely to hold out for a preferred salary. That curve begins to drop around the 46-50 age range, at which point workers may feel they are slightly more expendable and therefore are less likely to tempt fate by asking for more money.
In nearly every department, more men than women said they had negotiated their salaries. The only department where women had more positive responses than men was in Admin. An enormous gulf exists between male and female execs (67% vs 52%) and Communications (59% vs 44%).
Latest reading as of November 15.
