I am honored to be a Bedford Mentor at the University of North Texas School of Law. We divide into numerous small groups with the students, with each group reading a different book on matters of public interest. My group is reading a book on compensation issues of women: “Knowing Your Value; Women, Money and Getting What You’re Worth,” by Mika Brzezinski. So, I read with interest an article in the October 2014 issue of the Harvard Business Review by Joan C. Williams, “Hacking Tech’s Diversity Problem,” which deals with compensation issues for women in the high tech industry. But the challenges she discusses and the solutions she offers are useful for all employers. Williams advocates for the use of “bias interrupters,” which are small changes intended to derail bias.
Disrupter No. 1: Empower the female applicant by stating in any job posting that compensation is negotiable. One experiment showed that, absent these two words, women reverted to their traditional reluctance to negotiate salary. But inserting them not only led to higher offers to female applicants, but also closed the pay gap between men and women by 45 percent.
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