WAGE
Wage Negotiation Workshops
Laramie, WY
Our wage negotiation workshop seeks to bring understanding to the causes of the wage gap between men and women’s salaries, benchmark salaries in particular fields and geographical locations, as well as help women learn how to negotiate for a competitive wage based on their education and experience. The Wyoming Women’s Foundation (WYWF) bases our program on the national Wage Project. Wyoming has the largest gender wage disparity in the nation, so it is essential to educate and empower the population of our state.
In March of this year the WYWF solicited proposals to provide wage negotiation workshops across Wyoming. Critical elements for all successful proposals included educating participants on negotiating for a competitive salary or wage, emphasis on the importance of negotiating for a fair salary, training participants regarding how to research and establish a reasonable target salary for specific jobs in specific zip codes using a web-service such as salary.com, and teaching negotiation skills for use in the workplace. Inclusion of a follow-up procedure plan with program participants had to also be included. Of the proposals received, the recipients of the workshops were two fantastic groups, Carbon County Higher Education Center and the American Association of University Women.
Carbon County Higher Education Center, describes the community of Carbon County as having over 800 single parent families. Of those 800 families, 76.5% are headed by a single-mother; of these, over 50% are living below the poverty line. This means that more than 300 of the 4,134 families in Carbon County are living on less than $18,310 per year (family of three, mother and two children), when in reality they would actually need to make more than $28,000 to be truly self-sufficient. For some of these families, the lack of English speaking skills exacerbates the problem; within Carbon County 10.5% of the population are non-English speakers compared to 6.4% in the rest of the state, the majority of these non-English speakers speak Spanish (75.2%). CCHEC plans to implement the workshops in two targeted areas of the population: high school females, and also for the adult latina population.
AAUW is taking a slightly different approach to the wage negotiation training. AAUW's state and branch officers have receive training, and members from various branches have and will solicit local community centers, colleges, schools and/or other facilities to arrange Wage Project Workshops throughout Wyoming.
AAUW's and CCHEC's wage projects promise to impact to bring empowerment to Wyoming women and girls and better our communities.
For an example of our program go to www.wageproject.org
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