I recently was told that I was being egotistical from a friend for not wanting to say pay that was like entry level for senior work by a friend (I guess she thought I had overly desperate vibes, I don’t and I think it’s ridiculous women resort to having to take low-paying jobs). So if you ARE a machine learning/AI/XR engineer with 8-10 years experience, I don't think you want ot get paid like a college intern, but apparently I struck a chord and was met with a TON of animosity when I talked about mindset, positivity and concrete things you can demonstrate like publicly verifiable open source contributions, talks you've given, publications you've published, apps (paid and free) with real users that you have released...and people just thought I was gaslighting them.
I know that sounds OVERLY simple, it DID work for me, but it doesn’t always and I’m fully aware, institutionalized racism, sexism, privilege, exposure to opportunities, and old school attitudes towards women being overly needy or greedy and aggressive when asking for more (and get offers rescinded for jobs DOES exist). I'm fully aware of all of those dynamics, but I found conversations on some Slacks completely unsafe, very attacking to me and completely unfruitful - talk about scarcity mindset vs abundance mindset.
Keep in mind, in 2016 I found out I was getting paid 8-16x less my rate than cis straight white men and women for full stack engineering work AND design, and then over the years also found out I was getting paid by a magnitude of 32-64x less for my speaking rate -- only to find other Asian American women and women of color (authors who also work in tech, technical or not) didn't even get a book advance (at least I got that) and were stuck in their pay range.
I find this unacceptable and distastefulAF and if I hear one more time like 'oh well people are desperate and a job is better than no job than just take whatever,' it sounds completely self-defeating, unhelpful, and negativeAF and this is NOT great for the movement and especially at a time right now in our world and politics where we are going to see Justice Diversity Equity Inclusion and Belonging (JDEIB) funding getting massively cut or eliminated altogether. What the heck is so wrong about asking women to get paid more (srsly I just shake my head at the audacity of some people)? I get that some people may be desperate, but I don't want to stay in despair or stuck, or have other women be stuck frustrated there either.
tl;dr GET PAID MORE and you don't need to apologize about it, and please stop telling women to just settle for less saying it's a shit market. Tbh I know MANY people fully retired (from crypto), people who founded and sold their companies, people who are NON-technical that get paid way more than me who are positive and keep trying and do far less work and work smarter and don't listen to this kind of BS that says you should just 'take something as if it's like 'anything' to pay the bills).
SO, to be concrete/constructive, and in particular for women and women of color who I know tend to get paid less and deserve more — I’ve decided to share what DOES and HAS worked for me in negotiation to get paid more for jobs in tech (full time, consulting, speaking gigs etc.)
- “I got paid x y z doing this comparable work here so I think this is fair.” (This resulted in consulting rate which was a lot lower, it increased 4x after I did that).
- Given my expertise of x that I uniquely have done x y z (for me being only technical woman of color in the entire world who has published a book on this technology / subject matter expertise), I get offers and opportunities that demand this kind of energy, time and taking this offer would mean forgoing these other ones, hence in order for this to be valuable for my time, I will need x y z. So just insert, <“I’m an unique and other people that demand my attention want to pay me x y z more for this kind of time and attention for my work experience/skills/expertise, because of this y I bring this to the table, so z, pay me this much more.“> (same thing)
- “My standard range for this amount of work requiring this amount of time is x y z and x y z space to travel and energy (how you get people to pay for travel for speaking) to travel to x y z place to do x y z talk”. (also the same thing)
Be around good people. Raise your standards, keep 'em high, be realistic, BUT don't despair and let people tell you to be self-defeating, settle for less, or just 'leave tech,' that's not helpful AT ALL.
#equitypaygap #payequity #scarcitymindset #abundancemindset #equalpay #compensation #negotiation
