Arbitration & Mediation

The Peace and Prosperity Gang of She Negotiates Now Live at ForbesWoman

By Victoria Pynchon

Thanks to ForbesWoman, we've just inaugurated the She Negotiates Blog at the best women's business magazine around.  We introduce our mission and our contributors here.  Excerpt below.

You'll want meet with us here on a regular basis because women's misperceptions about their market value along with our negative attitudes toward asking, bargaining, haggling and negotiating are a big part of the reason why we haven't smashed the glass ceiling to smithereens, or flattened the wage gap. Women who work (and that means all of us) are hesitant to discuss these matters in mixed company. We'd rather tell ribald joke among our husbands' male friends than to suggest that implicit gender bias is holding us back in our careers, preventing us from being retained or promoted or moving a less qualified man into the C-suite.

One of our co-founders, Victoria Pynchon, knows this first hand because she's been teaching entrepreneurs and business people how to negotiate for the past five years. Our other founder, negotiation coach and trainer Lisa Gates knows it from a lifetime in business herself. Whenever either of us teaches men and women together, the women hold their breath about their most pressing concerns until break-time. Then they clamor for our private attention, asking questions they dare not ask in the presence of their male colleagues or supervisors or subordinates.

'How do I take a hard line,' they ask, 'without being called a bitch or a butch?' 'How can I counter hard-ball tactics with the more effective collaborative interest-based negotiation techniques you're teaching me?' 'Whenever I ask for a raise or a bonus, I hear that I'm being greedy or too aggressive even though my male colleagues do the same thing all the time and are never criticized for doing so?'

 

'Will it never change?'

We have answers to these questions but so do you. We're here to lead a discussion, to explore the territory more deeply, to concentrate the collective wisdom of women on a single topic: conversations that lead to agreements. And we do this best in one another's company, in community.

Four of us will regularly blogging here with Caroline Howard of ForbesWoman occasionally chiming in. For those who say 'but things are changing,' we have two smart and thoughtful Gen-Y bloggers, Katie Phillips, a recent graduate of the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU andRoxana Popescu, who just received her Ph.D in Literature from Harvard. Roxana was doing something pretty darn interesting during those academic years. She'd been asking for something different every day in her formerly anonymous blog, The Daily Asker.

We two boomers, Lisa Gates and Victoria Pynchon, are the principals of the training and consulting firm carrying the name of this blog, She Negotiates. Lisa is a consultant, trainer, teacher, writer and actor who has long trained women professionals, business people and artists how to balance their work, home and creative lives. My dog tag reads author lawyer, mediator, arbitrator, and, negotiation consultant and trainer. But none of these descriptors tell you who we truly are or why you might want to follow our new blog. We think you'll want to follow us because together we can grant Miss America her persistent wish, as least in our workplaces, communities and homes.

We are the Peace and Prosperity Gang and we're looking forward to an unprecedented 2011.

Full post as published by Settle It Now Negotiation Blog on December 10, 2010 (boomark / email).