Don’t Forget to Ask

For the upcoming issue of Women For Hire’s magazine, we commissioned original artwork to accompany some of the articles. I sent an email to several artists detailing the assignment and what it paid. I selected four illustrators and all of our communication was via email. During the process, one of them asked that I pay more money for the drawings because of the time and work involved. We accommodated the request.

Weeks later as I was collecting brief biographical information, I discovered that three of the artists were women and one was a man (with a somewhat gender-neutral name: Ajani). Guess who had been the one to ask for the extra cash? Yup, the lone fella.

I was shocked. Not because I felt duped or upset that a man was contributing; he has a gift and was a pleasure to work with. But I know the statistics—collectively women lose over $100 billion annually in wages due to pay inequity. I ended up paying other artists less, not because they weren’t good enough or equally talented. It was because they didn’t ask.

It made me think a lot about the times when I felt I wasn’t making enough or when I probably could’ve asked for more, but shied away because I “felt bad” or thought that was probably all they had to offer. In those situations, I was making money personal, when in reality, it’s not. It’s just money.

In the rest of the magazine, we asked several questions, including what if women negotiated for more money as often as men do? It shouldn’t be such a fantasy, and hopefully someday we’ll all see—as I did while working with the artists—that we have to know what we’re worth and we must be bold enough to go for it.