Entrepreneur Alert: Men Pay 100%, Women Pay 76%

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Elizabeth Daley writes: Elana Schlenker’s small pop-up shop, which opened on a struggling businesses corridor in April, drew customers, news crews and guest speakers not solely for its female-made merchandise but also its premise. At 76 < 100, as the boutique was called, men paid full price, while women paid 76 percent of that.

Schlenker wants to draw attention to gender-based wage inequality, prevalent around the world. At the chic store on Penn Avenue in Pittsburgh, items for sale ranged from honey collected by a female beekeeper to books by the Guerilla Girls art activist collective, with a quarter of products produced locally. Schlenker sourced female talent to cater events and design and build the store’s modern wooden displays.

Now, Schlenker is looking to take her wage-gap crusade down south to Louisiana. For the New Orleans pop-up, Mercure is scouting locations primarily in the Central Business District and the pair are aiming for a November opening.

In Pittsburgh, patrons were drawn to the shop for its programming but gender-based pricing was also an attraction.

The items for sale at 76 < 100 were made by female artists and craftspeople, with about a quarter of the products produced locally.

Schlenker, a Pittsburgh-based freelance graphic designer, said she got the idea for her temporary store from an art project she read about. “The artist had printed copies of a work and charged women $1 and men $2,” she said, explaining that she was reading articles on the wage gap at the time, and the ideas converged.

Fair compensation has nudged its way to the forefront of national conversation, with increasing public pressure to raise the federal minimum hourly wage from $7.25 (where it has remained since 2009), the Fight for $15 campaign (aimed at obtaining higher wages for fast-food employees) and lawsuits targeting unpaid internships.

Mary-Wren Ritchie, a Planned Parenthood employee who attended a panel discussion on the wage gap at 76 < 100, said she was frustrated by the injustice.

“It’s insane that it’s 2015 and we are still fighting to make an equal wage,” she said. “The system was built by men to benefit men, and we work so hard to be on an equal playing ground, but it sucks that we are still fighting.

76<100 pop-up shop in Pittsburgh

Women attend a wage negotiation workshop at 76 < 100.
Babcock, whose research informed the store’s wage negotiation workshop led by her students, said men were more likely to think it was their responsibility to obtain a fair wage. In a 2002 study of graduating Carnegie Mellon seniors, she found that only 12.5 percent of women were likely to negotiate for higher wages, compared with 51.5 percent of men. She said part of the reason for lack of negotiation among women is conditioning.“Women are taught that they are supposed to be looking after other people and not thinking about themselves,” she said. “Something that might seem fine for a man to do — like negotiate effectively — might be viewed differently if a woman is doing it.”At the training, Babcock’s students said negotiating successfully as a woman might involve a cooperative style of negotiation more in line with stereotypically feminine behavior — a help-me-help-you approach. While such behavior may produce more successful results, some women resist playing into female stereotypes.

Though Babcock’s work aims to improve women’s status, she said she is often afraid her research might be used to reinforce negative gender stereotypes.