British people, as a rule, hate to haggle. To watch a British person at a Moroccan rug stall at a bazaar is to see culture clash at its most tiresome. No, they do not want to offer “best price”, they don’t want a chat with your cousin about the price, they don’t want to sit and have a mint tea to talk about the price, they don’t want to storm off in faux disgust about the price. They just want to buy the rug. This is a part of understanding the women’s pay gap. Women seem to be the “British” of the genders, stuck in a Moroccan salary souk.
This week Jennifer Lawrence wrote an essay on why she got paid less than her male co-stars in American Hustle. She blames herself. She found the haggling over her pay packet unpleasant, while her male co-stars were commended for being “fierce and tactical” to up their price, she felt like a brat: “I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early.”
I’ve been there. I’ll willingly be the sucker in the bazaar that settles for what the astonished seller asks just to get out of there. The key book here is Women Don’t Ask, which I’ve lent to many of my friends, but been too embarrassed to ask them to return. The studies in it show that men initiate pay negotiations four times as often as women. In one study, eight times as many men as women graduates negotiated their starting salary, and the increases they got entirely accounted for the wage gap. When it comes to pay, women hate to haggle.
Is it nature or nurture that the British like to have a price sticker? Doesn’t matter really, but we see this trait as a good thing. We Brits want clarity, fairness, efficiency.
How much better it would be if the job market was less of a rug market? We could apply British transparency: each position would have a price tag attached. And if you were an actor, let’s say, you may be paid for being good at acting, not bargaining.
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Hot and righteous
My central heating is still off. Am I warm? Oh I’m warm all right. I may not look it, making tea in a deerstalker hat, fancy-dress onesie and fingerless gloves: my fashion lookbook this season is Maggie Smith in The Lady in the Van. Those of us who are holding off, we glow with self-righteousness that burns like a thousand suns.
Not funny
Romantic comedies used to end with the wedding. So it was from Shakespeare to Austen.
Now the genre has caught up with our post-marital society: romance ends with the baby. Catastrophe, one of the best romantic comedies around, begins a second TV series soon with a baby in tow. I keep bumping into the crew of the latest Bridget Jones film shooting all around London, with the star Renée Zellweger sporting the preggers prosthetic cushion up her jumper.
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It can’t go on. Romantic comedy is about, as the series says, “catastrophe”. You can fail adorably in dating and you can fail adorably when you have baby sick down your trousers. But there the material runs out. Happiness for children is based on an unfunny amount of stability. Have a series of catastrophes with older kids and it starts to feel tragic.
Not the best policy
The first contestant left the new series of The Apprentice because he tried to do the whole “I’m refreshingly honest about my shortcomings thing” that is so fashionable right now. It was like John McDonnell, the shadow chancellor, summing up his U-turn with “embarrassing, embarrassing, embarrassing”, it didn’t quite work. Honesty is not a virtue that outclasses all others. Old Yorkshire blokes at the bar, who delight in their “plain speaking”, use honesty to deliver cruelty, just as honesty can be used to dignify ineptitude.