Dive Brief:

• The compensation advisory firm 10x Ascend announced Jan. 14 a new service to help female senior-level tech professionals negotiate their total compensation packages. The company will offer tiered prices for their negotiation compensation services "to match the current pay gap as of 2019."
• Negotiations will focus on salaries, job titles, remote-work options and other conditions of employment. Although the general service was designed for both men and women, the company said it wants to help end gender-based pay disparities by providing women with the data needed to negotiate salaries that are on par with their male counterparts. 
• "Since we launched 10x Ascend, we've seen first-hand the lack of representation for female tech talent," said Rishon Blumberg, co-founder of 10x Ascend, in a statement. "We have launched this initiative to ensure that women feel as empowered as men at the negotiation table, and ultimately achieve equal pay, benefits and other key compensation factors to make a job offer worthwhile."

Dive Insight:

The current labor market may belong to workers, but when it comes to negotiating pay, benefits and employment conditions, they're falling short. A ZipRecruiter survey from late 2018 revealed that 64% of employees admitted accepting the first salary offer they received without trying to negotiate a better offer. A Monster survey released in August put the figure slightly higher, at 67%. ​However, for employees who did negotiate pay, ZipRecruiter said their compensation was $5,000 more than the original offer — which could easily add up to as much as an extra $750,000 earned over a lifetime. 

While Robert Half called negotiating higher salaries "the new normal," women were markedly less likely to attempt negotiation than men. Black employees also struggle under assumptions about pay and whether they will negotiate. Derek Avery, author of "Bargaining while Black: The role of race in salary negotiations," found through research that employers expected black employees to negotiate less pay than their white counterparts, and that when black employees defied that expectation, recruiters offered them lower pay. 

As more employers turn toward eliminating and preventing pay discrepancies, popular strategies have emerged that require companies to think twice about some standard operations. Experts have advised employers to keep job descriptions accurate, review target ranges in the industry and eliminating bias-producing information from the recruiting process as much as possible.