Tag Archives: negotiating salary

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TheNegotiator: Project Implemenation

  By Sabrina • July 24, 2015

Last week I motivated the need for The Negotiator, a tool to ease the uncomfortable process of salary negotiations. The idea is that up-to-date information along with targeted experience-based salary predictions empowers those of us who feel a little bit less than excited about the prospect of negotiating one’s own salary.

The following details the project goals in terms of application input and output and also how I envision implementing that in the project code.

Project Goal:

  1. Input: The user provides occupation, location and number of years of experience.
  2. Output: The Negotiator returns a targeted salary along with a fair salary range.

Project Implementation:

  1. Access the Bureau of Labor Statistics [API](http://www.bls.gov/developers/).
    1. Access salary data for requested information (occupation and location).
    2. Return to the recommender engine input the mean and min/max values for salary (or median, standard deviation, etc.)
    3. Report values and visualize information to user.
  2.  Calculate a targeted salary for user by incorporating number of years of experience. (This can be done by simply assuming the salaries are normally distributed and have a one-to-one mapping for years of experience and salary.)
    1.  Create a normal distribution with mean or median equal to the salary mean and spread equal to the range or standard deviation of reported salaries.
    2. This range is mapped as the min equals to zero years of experience and the max equals 20 years of experience.
  3. (Optional)
    1. Widgets
    2. Application
    3.  Is 20 years fair?
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The Negotiator: Motivation

  By Sabrina • July 14, 2015

According to the 2013 U.S. Census Bureau report women earn 78 cents to every dollar that men earn. This difference in salary between women’s and men’s earnings is known as the gender pay gap.

A number of factors have been put forth to explain the gap. Women report spending more time on childcare and housework per week than their male partners. Many women also report that their childcare and home duties had hindered their career advancement.

While certainly diversity has lagged behind in high paying jobs like in business, the tech industry and, science, technology, engineering and mathematic (STEM) professions, some studies that found that the pay gap persists in nearly every occupation.

Some suggest that women don’t negotiate as often or as aggressively as men and failure to do so can cause millions of dollars left on the table over a lifetime. However, regardless of whether a women negotiates her starting salary, her worth is still deemed to be lower than her equally experienced and educated male counterpart.

A tool that provides discipline-specific salary statistics can help women (anyone who would rather avoid negotiating) succeed stress-free at the negotiating table. Stay tuned for the next installment for my vision of the new project “The Negotiator”.