Doree Shafrir wrote an interesting take on discrepancies between male and female wages over at Jezebel. She takes into consideration a lot of the outside factors often ignored in the 77-cents-on-the-dollar figure that’s normally thrown around in this debate, normalizing for different career choices and the like — though it turns out “there’s still a five percent wage gap for male and female college graduates, even after controlling for things like age, race and ethnicity, region, marital status, children, occupation, industry, and hours worked, according to testimony given in April to the United States Joint Economic Committee.”

Doree concludes that this is because women are less likely than men to negotiate their salaries, and I think she’s right to a certain degree. I know I was really freaked out by the prospect at first, and I’ve always been more willing and perhaps able to negotiate in jobs that I didn’t want as much as the ones I did.

But the thing is, I think Doree is ignoring the sociology behind negotiations. This argument presumes that women would be able to win those arguments were they even to bring it up; given she led with Peggy Olsen from Mad Men being snubbed when asking for a raise, this seems pretty funny to me. Women are not rewarded for being aggressive or going after what they want, and I’ve certainly gotten a toned-down Don Drapering myself sometimes when asking to be paid a fair wage for my work. I think it’s important  to encourage women to negotiate, but it’s unfair to put all the blame on them for not asking when there’s still the matter of someone — usually a man — with the real power.

Then again, more men have hired me than women, so fuck if I know what’s going on here, but it probably has something to do with my breasts.