Research shows that the typical American woman misses out on $1 million in earnings over her lifetime because she lacks salary negotiation skills. The $tart $mart workshops address the gender gap in U.S. wages as well as skills and tactics for negotiating salaries. The program is the result of a partnership between AAUW and the WAGE Project (WAGE stands for Women Are Getting Even).
In 2011, the AAUW Huntsville (AL) Branch won an AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund Campus Outreach Grant for the second year in a row. Last year, we used the funds to bring The Yellow Dress, a play about dating violence, to campus. This year, we co-sponsored a $tart $mart salary negotiation workshop at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, on November 4.
Twenty-four students attended the three-hour workshop, along with 18 women from three universities who were trained as $tart $mart facilitators. The UA-Huntsville Career Development Office organized the workshop and trained four of their own faculty and staff members as facilitators. Annie Houle, national director of campus and community initiatives at the WAGE Project, conducted the workshop and the facilitator training. The Career Development Office plans to offer more $tart $mart workshops on campus tailored to particular colleges of the university. Most of the students who attended came from the colleges of business, engineering, and science, and many of them were graduate students. We hope to reach out to graduating seniors, especially those in liberal arts, by advertising future workshops through social networking channels.
More than 200 $tart $mart workshops have been offered nationwide since the project began in 2007. Houle reported on these statistics and other gender gap issues at the Huntsville Branch meeting on the day after the workshop. For more information about $tart $mart, visit the AAUW website.
This blog post was written by Rose Norman, AAUW Huntsville (AL) Branch member and UA-Huntsville retired faculty.
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