Negotiating As A Woman

As a woman, it’s incredibly important to understand proper negotiation skills to ensure that you get what your real worth is in any job setting.

Knowing “Invaluable tips on how to negotiate, especially navigating pitfalls that disproportionately affect women, are highly important to focus on.” It’s important to protect your worth, understand the power of silence, and to ask the right questions.

It’s important to realize that gender plays a role in how some people view negotiations. For women, “to grasp the liberating power of negotiation, we first need to analyze how gender – as a social construction – influences women conducting negotiations.”

It’s already known that women can become excellent negotiators when it comes to both family and social settings. However, when it comes to negotiation in work environments, women often negotiate less effectively on their own behalf.

To counter this issue in work environments for women, there are effective strategies that women, who are uncomfortable negotiating in professional settings, can take.

Carter’s own struggles with negotiating inspired her to help others improve their own negotiation skills. “I was great at negotiating for other people, but I still struggled to do it for myself. I’ve talked to a lot of professional women who have felt the same way.”

It wasn’t until she had to negotiate my own salary that she realized that asking for more was something we all need to be doing. She emphasizes that asking for more normalizes the process of claiming your value so that the women who follow will feel confident to do the same thing.

Alex recalls how she realized that she had to communicate her value to improve negotiation outcomes. “I teach that negotiation is steering. It’s any conversation in which you are steering a relationship in the desired direction [meaning] you don’t wait for the money conversation to teach someone how to value you. When negotiating, you should be thinking about steering that relationship in every conversation you have.”

Training and preparing for negotiation by recognizing the gender aspect – because it structures our relations with others and to the world – is the key to professional and personal success. I want all women to understand the importance of asking for what they’re worth!