When a woman simply accepts the salary she’s offered instead of negotiating for a better package, she is sacrificing, on average, more than half a million dollars over the course of her career.

$500,000 in lost earnings.

So says a recent article in the August issue of PINK Magazine, referencing comments by Linda Babcock, about whom I’ve written before. While women tend to negotiate darn well on others’ behalf, we tend to bargain less effectively for ourselves.

If you had half a million dollars, would you throw it into the wind because it’s easier than engaging in a negotiation? That’s just what you’re doing when you accept salary offers with little real effort to bargain, especially since most employers make an initial offer with the assumption that people will try to negotiate the package upward.

The article concludes with this: “Your mother taught you that it’s not polite to talk about money…So pretend that you are helping a third party get a raise. It takes a bit of coaching and practice for people to step out.” If you’re one of the many women out there who doesn’t negotiate well for herself with salary, benefits and raises, what would be helpful for you to learn how to do, specifically?

Here’s to earning the salary you’re worth,

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.