SLU hosts female-only salary negotiation workshop

Saint Louis University is hosting a women-only “pay inequity” workshop to teach negotiating strategies to help them overcome the “gender wage gap” in the workforce.

“On average, women earn just 80% of what men typically earn each year,” asserts an announcement emailed to the campus community. “Among college graduates, one year after graduating there was a 7% difference in the earnings of males and females. It grew to a 12 percent difference in 10 years after graduation.”

The workshop aims to empower women to negotiate starting pay salary, noting that this is a “key skill” to addressing the pay gap.

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Additional goals of the workshop include understanding “the role of negotiation in the hiring process,” learning to “determine salary ranges based upon qualifications and market value,” providing “a model to create a personal budget,” and “[empowering] women to effectively negotiate salary and benefits.”

While the workshop is for women only, the email was also sent to male students “to raise awareness of pay inequity and in the hope they will support our Billiken women.”

Garrett Ziegler, a junior studying economics in the John Cook School of Business, told Campus Reform that he considers the workshop “ludicrous,” noting that prominent female conservatives have repeatedly scoffed at the notion of gender-based pay inequity.

“While training for salary negotiations is a perfectly valid task of an undergraduate business school, the lies being peddled to justify it are ludicrous,” he said. “Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has repeatedly explained the myth.”

In a column last summer for TIME, he noted, Hoff Sommers argued that “the 23-cent gender pay gap is simply the difference between the average earnings of all men and women working full-time,” and “does not account for differences in occupations, positions, education, job tenure, or hours worked per week.”

According to the column, “When such relevant factors are considered, the wage gap narrows to the point of vanishing.”

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"This is but one in a long string of instances wherein the the progressive Academy is in the business of social engineering and activism,” Ziegler declared, positing that “we can fight for justice while avoiding the call to immanentize the eschaton."

Campus Reform reached out to SLU for comment, but did not receive a response in time for publication.

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AutumnDawnPrice