Ask for that raise!

Here at My Moon Landing, we were pleased to host the second cohort of our Financial Fundamentals Programme in January-February 2023. As our core skills workshops ended, we were left to ponder the many lessons learnt about the debt/credit system, wage gaps and money mindset in March. 
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One discussion that stuck with our participants was around the pay raise disparity. We began the session with a short game organised by our Finance Expert in Residence, Fi Titus. Participants were told they would be taken to 1:1 breakout rooms and asked a quiz question, with a chance to be paid between £1 - £5 if they answered correctly. 

All participants entered the breakout space separately and answered Fi's questions correctly. In return, they were offered £1. Once we returned to the main room, participants were asked if they thought something was amiss. The big question was, "What did they have to do to get the £5?” Fi's answer to this was: ask for it! 

This game is based on a social experiment discussed in the book 'Women Don't Ask' by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. As explained in Forbes, 'participants were told they'd be paid between $3 and $10 for playing the game Boggle (a word search game). Once they completed several rounds of the game, the participants were given $3 by the experimenter and told, "Here's $3. Is $3 okay?" If they directly asked for more money, they were paid $10. However, they were not paid more if they merely complained about their pay. Male and female participants thought they did equally well playing Boggle, so there were no gender differences in perceptions of their performance. However, men were nine times more likely than women to ask the experimenter for more money directly. The women didn't ask.'

In our session, there was a discussion about the issue of asking for a raise at work. A quiz we had done earlier revealed that all of us thought asking for a raise was scary, and our conversation now revealed that some of us had never even thought about it as a possibility. The research covered by Sky News tells us that men are way more likely to ask for and get the raises they want at work. The fault isn't just in our money mindsets, though, surveys have also shown that despite asking for raises, women of colour are significantly less likely to receive them than white men. 

So what does this mean for women in the workplace? In our workshop, we discussed that while research pieces and endless anecdotal experiences prove that the gender and racial wage gaps are very real phenomena, the game was an opportunity to look inward, have faith in our ability as employees, and at least ask for that raise. Participants told us later that they felt encouraged to go out there and do their bit to get a raise. We hope this read encourages you too! 

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