Based on many of the responses in this thread alone, I wouldn’t be surprised if people ended up criticizing her if she did that. That stating that she had other offers made her seem more demanding.
As we’ve seen, her telling them that she had other offers wouldn’t have helped her in this case anyway. The college would still have rescinded her offer, it would have just been an easier decision for them.
In my best ‘cheap foreigner’ accent:
‘I vant doo buy dat but I don’ vant doo pay for it’.
I think it would probably depend on how she phrased that statement. It strikes me that what makes her counter-offer email come across as demanding is that it’s just a bald listing of what she wants with zero explanation or justification. If she’d said that their salary offer was below average for the field, that she wanted to clarify her understanding of current practices re: maternity leave and make sure “unofficial policy” didn’t bite her in the butt by being unofficial, that she wanted to make sure she had adequate time to prepare the best possible classes for her students, etc., it would have come across completely differently. It would have come across as “I’d like,” or “I think it would benefit us both if” rather than a semi-arbitrary wall of “I want.” People will often outright grant or at least discuss “I’d like because” and “I think it would benefit us both” whereas arbitrary “I want” just pisses them off.
In that vein, if she’d sent an email that was just a numbered list of what the other place was offering with a “Let me know what you think” at the end, that may very well have been seen as demanding and the response may well have been “We think you should take the other job.” If she’d sent a list of what the other place was offering, with some explanation of which factors are important to her, which ones she realizes might be harder for them to match, etc…that might have opened up a true negotiation, or at least kept her offer in place.
Yes, and this post has it exactly right. It’s why I said her message was too casual and flippant.
In my limited experiences with academic hiring, I served as the grad student representative on three search committees. In one, our first choice declined the offer. We did not extend an offer to anyone else, just restarted the search the next year. It’s important to remember that the pace of an academic institution is positively glacial. In the second, we hired someone at the full professor level. She spend a year on sabbatical before joining department, so her first day was something like 15 months after the offer was made. In the third, we hired a new Ph.D. He requested, and received, a deferred start date so he could spend a year at a fellowship. His first day on the job was again probably 15 or more months after receiving the offer. I believe other negotiations happened, but I don’t remember the details.
As a relatively recent Ph.D. myself, all of W’s requests sound positively reasonable to me, and like things I can easily imagine my advisors recommending I request.
I’ll freely admit that I am not in academia, but why would an organization form a search committee if you can wait 15 months for the new hire to come on board? What if the preferred candidate wants to start tomorrow? Do you request that he or she wait 15 months, or can the candidate start immediately?
It seems like you would be either overstaffed or understaffed.
I’d think an academic starting in the middle of a term would be pretty useless. When we hire new college grads at any level we know that they may not be starting for a while, and that is in the plan. Very different from hiring an experienced candidate who will more or less start right away.
Your criicisms are all on point, but nevertheless, this is how academia works. Add to this that your typical job application for a tenure-track position is around 50 pages, and months go by with no communication from the committee to anyone.
Academic hiring committees are one of the few categories that could really benefit from the methods of your typical HR department. Yes, even yours.
To some extent, it’s less a let’s-get-this-cog-in-the-wheel-filled than a more thoughtful, long term planning. If you have the ability to do it, why not?
Well academia is a different world, but what I saw in her message showed a lack of respect and consideration. She did not even give lip service to her teaching responsibilities. ‘Me, me, me, me, me…’
Tenure track hiring is more like a marriage than anything else. People are less concerned with immediate detais, and more concerned about the long-term fit. So not being able to start immediately isn’t usually a dealbreaker.
I think she could have been more elegant in her phrasing, but I also think women are between a rock and a hard place. I am in a book club with a dozen or so smart, career-driven women. We all have similar backgrounds and qualifications, and work in the same industry, and we are all very hirable. Early in our post-graduate job search, I mentioned that I read in an article only some tiny percent of women negotiate, and that we should all try negotiating. In my first consulting gig, I threw an outrageous number out there, and it was immediately accepted.
Embolden by this, we all started negotiating. And you know what? It didn’t really work. I got a job offer once, only to find in the offer letter (and every offer I’ve had has only discussed salary in the offer letter, unless they were offering a lower hourly rate) they wanted to pay me half of what I was currently making, and I only managed to get them to raise it a couple percent. When I went on to a permanent position at the place I was consulting at, the offer was much lower than I expected and I asked for a 9% raise on that-- totally in line with jobs at that level in that industry would make-- and it fell flat. I was told to take it or get out. My friends all had similar stories.
Later someone else brought in an article showing that negotating, for women, didn’t really work, and needed to be done gently and with deference. What appears confident, or even just normal, for a man, can seem “princessy” or entitled in a woman.
And so where does that leave us? Just making less than a man in our same position? Unable to negotiate our labor? Coming up with elaborate ruses to introduce the subject without making anyone think we might gasp want something?
I don’t know, I don’t have answers. But it sucks that we have all these extra hoops to jump through to do what men do consistantly, without much extra though or complications, when negotiating job offers.
There is more to ‘negotiating’ than merely ‘asking for more’. Women sometimes don’t understand the intricacies and subtleties in things of this nature. This is about power and positioning. You can’t just plop yourself down and think you will succeed.
I think a lot of women are experiencing that that the “intricacies and subtleties” are so intricate and subtle that when it shakes out it comes down to “don’t try this if you’re a woman.”
And if negotiating the social pitfalls of negotiating compensation really is so tricky, then maybe we as a society should find a better way of doing it. Like, for example, eliminating individual negotiation—simply disclosing compensation packages up front and letting people know ahead of time what the scales are.
Sadly, I don’t think the gender equality gap is going anywhere quickly. Big things move slowly and societal norms are a big, lumbering, slow-witted thing. Both men and women are prone to subconsciously judge people differently based on gender. I think the best thing society can do to mitigate this issue is to increase awareness. Most people have a lot of preconceptions of gender roles and behaviors that are probably mostly bunk, and it takes a lot of introspection and mindfulness to overcome them.
Whenever someone gets treated differently simply for being a woman, especially in a professional capacity, it should be publicized. In W’s case, though, I’m not convinced that this was an instance of sexism. Therein lies the problem: what does one do in an ambiguous case like this? Assume it’s sexism and shine a light on it, or assume it’s not and move on?
I’m not sure what the big deal is here other than she (in ignorance) thinks she was shafted. This is what more older people call a “learning experience”. Hopefully, she does learn from it. But she had little to lose by asking and they had little to lose by saying “hell no”.
I actually think it was polite of her to let them know she was considering a pregnancy but the status quo is you don’t mention it until you are actually pregnant. (Surprise! You’ll have to find someone to finish teaching this semester as I’m five months along…) Unfortunately, discrimination has proven that the surprise element is necessary.
I do think the sabbatical routine is a bit of a laugh to request when you don’t already have a good reputation under your belt.
Hopefully, both parties are a bit wiser now.
Who says she doesn’t? It’s entirely possible to publish enough papers, and of high enough quality, in grad school so that you essentially have the CV of an assistant professor. We also (I think) don’t know how many postdocs she’s done, which would be an additional opportunity to rack up the publications.
True.
I don’t think we were being gauche. We were all mid-career professionals with plenty of successful years in the workforce, and pretty adept at negotiating power and politics. We had all done our research, and some of us has even done coursework in negotiation.
It’s not like our vaginas made us go “Huuu-man want raise. Human want million dollar. You now my slave. Babies and makeup!”
Ovaries. It’s ovaries that make you behave irrationally. So I hear.