In Utah, women make 70 cents for every dollar a man makes.

It’s a fact that can be frustrating and disheartening for women in the workforce. But there are ways to combat the gender wage gap, according to Elizabeth Tashjian, associate professor of finance at the David Eccles School of Business.

She has looked at the gender wage gap and why it exists. She also knows how women can fight against it. Here is her advice:

• Be familiar with your industry. “It helps a lot if you know what other salaries people are making and what kinds of opportunities people have for raises,” she said. If you know those things, when you sit down with a boss to discuss a raise or promotion, you have information to support why you should get a raise.

• Find a mentor and champion. “If you have a good mentor or champion, you are not always the person who is constantly whining and saying, ‘Oh I deserve more,’ but rather somebody else is going in and advocating for you,” she said.

• Practice negotiation. “One of the things that I found very helpful is thinking about who is the person you’re speaking to, who is your specific audience, what turns on that person, what turns off that person, what’s a really good approach when you go in and talk with somebody,” she said.

• Develop a peer network. Find colleagues who know the lay of the land and can offer helpful advice about the best negotiation tactics to get what you want from a promotion or raise discussion.

Tashjian discusses those tips more in-depth and reasons behind the gender wage gap in this podcast. A full transcription can be found below.

Eccles School: Welcome to the Eccles Extra Podcast, I’m your host Sheena MacFarland. Today we are joined by Elizabeth Tashjian, associate professor of finance at the David Eccles School of Business. She is the director of the Garn Institute of Finance and a David Eccles Fellow. Dr. Tashjian is actively involved in promoting and addressing women’s issues at the University of Utah. Today she’s talking with us about the gender wage gap. Thanks for joining us today.

Elizabeth Tashjian: Thank you Sheena.

Eccles School: First let’s talk about something that has been getting a lot of press lately, the gender wage gap. What does that gap look like here in Utah?

Elizabeth Tashjian: Actually it is about 78 percent. So women are $0.78 on the dollar for every dollar that men earn. And within Utah it’s 70 percent, so women earn $0.70 on the dollar. That puts us 44th in the nation.

Eccles School: Wow, so why does that gap exist?

Elizabeth Tashjian: Well, that’s a great question. So historically, it has been worse if you go back quite a few years say to 1973, it was more like $0.57 on the dollar, but it hasn’t moved a lot in the last decade. So people have a variety of ideas about why that might be. One thing is, I’m a finance professor and a lot of the high-wage jobs like finance or engineering have fewer women representing them. A lot of the low-wage jobs, the helping jobs — things like nursing opposed to being a physician are more heavily dominated by women. So that’s one factor that explains it.

Another thing is that women are more likely to take time out of their career for family building. And a third thing is that women often opt into careers that have potential for more work-life balance than their male counterparts. So those might explain the gender wage gap. People have done a lot of research trying to account for those different factors and discovered that those things help to explain part of the difference but they don’t fully explain the difference between male and female salaries.

So for example, for people who just graduated from college, you find that there is still a gap of about 7% between man and woman even if you account for what degree, whether they’re an accounting major or biology major. And what’s interesting is that wage gap gets worse. So one of the things if you are a student who’s graduating from an undergraduate program right now and you take a job with a large company, say a big financial company or a big manufacturing company, it’s almost guaranteed that the female and male graduate course starting at the same time are going to end up exactly with the same salary. That’s the sort of thing that people do to try and prevent any kind of unconscious bias.

But what’s interesting is that if you go out say 10 years, the gap starts to widen. The more education you have, the bigger that gap gets. So for example, if you look at MBA students coming out, that gap is wider than for undergraduates.

Eccles School: That’s kind of amazing to me and really disheartening in a lot of ways. You were talking kind of about what positions women take and woman often seem to be lacking in these leadership positions as well. What have you found in looking at that kind of statistic?

Elizabeth Tashjian: So it is an interesting thing, women are a bit between a rock and a hard place. So one of the things that’s interesting is that women don’t negotiate as much as men do. And so I look at myself for example, when I came out of graduate school, all of the people who joined the University of Utah before me and all of the people who joined after me negotiated for moving expenses. I made sort of a half-hearted attempt to do that and I was the only person for many years on either side — maybe ever — who didn’t get moving expenses coming out. And I was not an expert in negotiation as I’m from a family of all girls and when I was growing up, that wasn’t a skill that was really stressed in the family, and I think a lot of women have that.

So on the one hand, we’re perhaps socialized to viewing negotiation as unattractive. On the flipside though, when women do stand up and try and advocate for themselves, often times they are seen as overly aggressive and so that’s a real challenge for women. This problem tends to get worse, and this is part of why the gender wage gap gets worse with experience the farther you go.

So for example, there is research showing that if you look at particularly men who are very hierarchical in the views, although women also fall into this, a woman who is viewed as more competent can actually be downgraded in terms of performance evaluation. A lot of that is subconscious bias, there is a feeling that perhaps it is not appropriate behavior.

In academe, which is of course where I spend a lot of my time, teaching evaluations are very interesting. You see male faculty getting rated a lot more on intelligence, female faculty rated a lot more on nurturing. And so you can see if you’re trying to compare two employees, if you are a boss and you’re looking at things and you’re looking at the sort of intelligence path as you evaluate your male faculty and you’re looking at sort of the nurturing path as you’re evaluating female employees, you could see that you come to very different conclusions for two employees who have very similar records. And for example, high intelligence is something that’s really important for the job, the fact that you’re not considering a woman as strongly in that dimension might adversely affect her raises down the road.

Eccles School: That’s just fascinating to me that that is kind of what happens even on a subconscious level. When women are kind of between that rock and a hard place, how do they fight against that the gender wage gap?

Elizabeth Tashjian: So I think one of the things that’s really important is to be very familiar with your industry. It helps a lot if you know what other salaries people are making, what kinds of opportunities people have, for example, is it two years, three years, five years to the typical next step in terms of promotion. If you know all those things when you go in and meet with your boss to talk about performance, it’s very helpful to begin that conversation by saying I’ve been here two years and I understand that three years is a typical timeframe in this world for promotion, so as I set my goals for next year, what kinds of things do I need to be doing in order to get a promotion? That puts it in the person’s head, it gives you direct feedback on what your boss is looking for. So knowing those kinds of things can help or knowing that everybody else is getting a moving allowance which I didn’t know at the time. So those kinds of things are important.

Finding a really good mentor and champion is important also. If you have a good mentor or champion, you are not always the person who is constantly whining and saying, “Oh I deserve more,” but rather somebody else is going in and advocating and saying, “Wow, Sheena did all of these really great things. She’s come up with a lot of really new exciting plans. They have changed her brand image in these ways.” And that is external validation of what you are doing and somebody else with at least helping you to fight that fight and so somebody who is drawing attention to your successes. I mean it’s pretty much a drag to listen to somebody saying,” I’m great, I’m great,” all the time, it’s nice is somebody else says that for you and so I think that’s really important.

The other thing is practicing negotiation and developing a peer network. One of the things that I found very helpful is colleagues are really good at doing this and thinking about who is the person you’re speaking to, who is your specific audience, what turns on that person, what turns off that person, what’s a really good approach when you go in and talk with somebody. So that you are respecting where that person is coming from, what do they value in the organization and what it is that you are bringing to that specific value. If you just sit there and say “I am doing well, I deserve to be rewarded,” that’s not as compelling as saying, “I know that you value these three things for the organization. These are your strategic goals and here is how I fit into that.”

So I think knowing your audience and also the sort of style that you use for negotiating, are they going to respond well or poorly to a technique. Those are probably the most important things.

Eccles School: Excellent, this has been both enlightening and incredibly helpful. So thank you so much for joining us.

Elizabeth Tashjian: Thank you.

Eccles School: I’m Sheena MacFarland, and this has been the Eccles Extra Podcast.