It’s Negotiation November! Every Wednesday day this month, we’re publishing an article with advice and inspiration on negotiation.

By Robin Madell

Negotiating for higher compensation can be stressful even under the best of circumstances. But in times of economic uncertainty, broaching the subject of a raise from your employer can feel even more daunting. You may feel lucky to have a job at your level, or in your industry, at all.

But just because the economy is suffering financially doesn’t mean that you must do so too. With companies short-staffed and tightening their belts, each employee becomes even more valuable. The trick is in getting your employer to recognize your worth and reward you accordingly.

“Traditionally, women are better at negotiating for 
their companies than for themselves,” says attorney and mediator Cynthia Pasciuto of legal consulting firm True North Business Consulting. “They do not ask for as much money as they should.” To help you avoid that problem and improve your chances for a successful outcome, keep the following five tips in mind the next time you negotiate for a raise.

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By Tina Vasquez (Los Angeles)

A recent Bloomberg article by writer Anne Kreamer is proving to be quite controversial. In “Tears for Peers Are Newly OK in Modern Workplace,” Kreamer contends that women have distinctly female parts—their essential femininity, their nurturing impulses, and aspects of their intrinsic emotional biology, such as crying. According to Kreamer, these things are not socially-conditioned, but rather “neurobiologically hard-wired.”

While researching her latest book, Kreamer discovered that 41 percent of women and 9 percent of men reported that they had cried in the workplace during the past year. “This finding conforms to the national gender split that neurologists have found. Women, who produce higher levels of prolactin, the hormone that controls tear production, cry on average 5.3 times a month, compared with 1.4 times for men,” Kreamer wrote. “Women’s tear ducts are also anatomically different from men’s — they are smaller, which means that when women cry, tears tend to spill out and down their faces, whereas when men cry, their tears merely well up.”

She concludes by writing that tears at work aren’t necessarily a moral failing or a sign of weakness. While that may be true, claims of tears not being socially-conditioned are not only biased, but dangerous. Here’s why.

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By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

We’ve all been there before. It’s Friday. The day is dragging on. You’ve got a massive amount of work staring at you between now and dinner. The weather outside is gorgeous. But… you’re inside, and the buzz of the fluorescent lights above is giving you a headache.

You look around – everyone’s got their head down, minding their own business. You know you shouldn’t, but you open up your web browser. You click over to your local newspaper’s web site, your favorite celebrity gossip forum, or (gasp) Facebook, and spend 10 minutes joyfully killing time. You quickly minimize the window when a coworker walks by, and get back to work – refreshed and ready to tackle the task at hand.

Don’t feel guilty though. According to a new study, surfing the web at work (or “cyberloafing”) is actually good for your productivity. And the reason may surprise you.

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By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

In her jaw-dropping 2003 New York Times article, “The Opt Out Revolution,” columnist Lisa Belkin suggested that the reason women aren’t rising to leadership roles in large numbers is simply because they’re not interested. She wrote, “Why don’t women run the world? Maybe it’s because they don’t want to.”

Belkin said highly talented and educated professional women were choosing family over work, and deciding to “opt out” of the workforce all together. She placed the responsibility for “opting out” squarely on the shoulders of women themselves – and framed it as an empowered decision on their behalf. The backlash to the piece was swift – Joan Williams, Founder of the Center for Work Life Law at UC Hastings was one of the first to proclaim the “opt out revolution” a myth. She said, “When we talk about work/family conflict, we talk about professional women opting out – but often they are pushed out, because of all-or-nothing workplaces.”

In fact, the “opt-out” myth was largely debunked by a 2009 report by the U.S. Census Bureau which found that most stay-at-home mothers were part of low income families with limited educations – not exactly the high powered professionals Belkin described.

Subsequent research by The Center for Work/Life Policy also revealed that professional women who had left the workforce were less often “opting out” than being pushed out by workplaces that were inflexible and unresponsive to their needs.

In fact, the CWLP’s 2010 study “On-Ramps and Off-Ramps Revisited” [PDF] showed that, “A full 69 percent of women say they wouldn’t have off-ramped if their companies had offered flexible work options such as reduced-hour schedules, job sharing, part-time career tracks or short unpaid sabbaticals.”

It seems the biggest factor in off-ramping was environmental, rather than personal.

Yet new research out of Northwestern University‘s Kellogg School of Management shows that the “opt out” myth persists – and it keeps women from getting ahead.

Nicole M. Stephens, assistant professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg, and co-author of the study with Cynthia S. Levine, a psychology doctoral student at Stanford University, explained, “Although we’ve made great strides toward gender equality in American society, significant obstacles still do, in fact, hold many women back from reaching the upper levels of their organizations.”

She continued, “In our research, we sought to determine how the very idea of ‘opting out,’ or making a choice to leave the workplace, may be maintaining these social and structural barriers by making it more difficult to recognize gender discrimination.”

According to the research, women who described their career breaks as the result a personal choice were less likely to identify examples of discrimination and structural barriers to advancement. Choice-focused women were blind to societal and environmental disadvantages that may have influenced their career trajectory.

What’s most concerning about the study is not that these individual women were blind to workplace bias – it’s that the majority of the women surveyed felt this way. Our culture of choice is causing us to ignore the structural inequality that is keeping women out of the corner office.

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By Melissa J. Anderson (New York City)

If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times – you need to work on your “personal brand.” You need to be sure you are broadcasting the real you – your authentic self and the professional skills that you want to be famous for – in a way that gets you noticed, networked, and needed.

But that’s not all. Somewhere along the line, the concept of personal branding – introduced in the early ’80s and then made popular by Inc. Magazine writer Tom Peters in 1997 – began to include the internet. The rise of social networking in the past decade means you can’t just brand yourself in the office, amongst your colleagues and clients. Personal branding means putting yourself out there in the digital space for all the world to see and search. And networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and now Google+ make it easy to set down the stakes in your personal brand – empowering you to make sure the world knows why your commitments, your best skills, and your passions make you indispensable.

That’s the good news. The bad news, though, is what many of us already know about social networking: it can be a slippery slope to narcissism. The very ease of publishing photos of ourselves, links about our interests, and questions about our curiosities means we do. And we do it a lot. Rather than being a platform to sell our strengths and abilities, social networking can be simply become a showcase for them.

Here’s how to make sure your efforts toward personal branding are actionable, effective, and authentic – rather than narcissistic, solipsistic, or gratingly, unabashedly self-absorbed.

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