More than half of professionals didn’t negotiate the salary for their most recent job, according to a Sept. 19 report from Glassdoor.
The percentages vary widely based on industry and age, but are equal for men and women, the data shows.
“Salary negotiation is one of the most common topics professionals seek content on, but it’s still hard to get a macro understanding of who’s negotiating and who isn’t,” the Glassdoor Economic Research Team wrote.
In a survey of nearly 6,700 professionals on Fishbowl by Glassdoor, 54% said they didn’t negotiate their most recent salary, while 46% said they did.
By industry, salary negotiation was most common among advertising, marketing, and tech professionals, at 67%, 62%, and 56%, respectively. At the opposite end, graduate students had the lowest negotiation percentage, at 22%, followed by accounting and law professionals at 37%.
By the gender binary, men and women are equally as likely to negotiate. About 46% of both men and women said they negotiated their most recent salary.
New laws around pay transparency could influence salary negotiation tactics. Nearly 7 in 10 workers have said they’d likely demand to be paid at the highest end of a salary range, according to a Resume Builder survey. In addition, 6 in 10 said they’d request equivalent pay if they found out their co-workers were being paid more for the same job.
Despite increasing support for pay equity, systemic barriers and other factors still block access to negotiating power. For instance, women are more likely to be rejected when negotiating for higher pay with prospective employers, according to a Pew Research Center survey.
Pay transparency can help narrow the gender pay gap during salary negotiations in some cases, but it doesn’t address every factor on the table, according to a recent study by University of Delaware researchers. Job candidates vary on how they seek information about a job and its salary, as well as traits such as aggressiveness and competitiveness, which can influence negotiation tactics.
