- Nearly half of workers who asked for a raise last year were successful, a FlexJobs survey says.
- Respondents also said they felt more empowered in the last year to ask for more money.
- Workers, especially women, may be seeing more negotiating power as the labor shortage persists.
Fortune does favor the bold — at least for half of working Americans.
That's according to FlexJobs' Work Insight 2022 survey, which found that 47% of 1,248 employed workers who negotiated for a salary last year were successful. The survey highlights that people prioritize pay amongst all else when it comes to job hunting, 83% of respondents saying they do so, with nearly as many saying remote work flexibility is the factor that influences them most.
The culture around salary negotiation and pay transparency may be shifting — about the same number of respondents who asked for a raise last year said that they have discussed their salary with a colleague, while a BankRate survey found that less than a quarter of workers were willing to confer with a coworker in 2018. Additionally, more than a third of respondents said that they've felt more empowered to negotiate their salary or ask for a raise in the past year than they were before, according to FlexJobs.
Nearly 47 million Americans quit their jobs last year, according to the Labor Department. The worker shortage barely eased through February, even as hiring surged and more Americans rejoined the workforce. People have reported quitting due to a lack of remote flexibility at their jobs, poor working conditions, and low pay over the past year; US workers have been getting their biggest pay bumps in two decades in response, although rising inflation means that they haven't been reaping the benefits.
"No matter what kind of raise, bonus, or other perks workers received last year, the Great Resignation has helped many feel more confident about negotiating a higher salary or asking for a raise," FlexJobs wrote in their study.
Workers have more negotiating power, and it might be helping women
Women may not be receiving raises from their current employers, but they've experienced pandemic success by quitting and seeking higher pay elsewhere.
That's according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve's wage growth tracker, which showed this month that the rate of wage increases for women has been outpacing that of men for six consecutive months. Approximately 31% of women who switched jobs in the past two years received compensation packages, including salaries and bonuses, more than 30% that of their previous positions, the Conference Board, a private-research group, found in February.
Those findings represent a sharp departure from historical data about salary negotiations — according to a study of recent Carnegie Mellon University graduates, 57% of the men negotiated their salary, while only 7% of women did. The men had starting salaries 7.6% higher than their female counterparts. Two decades of research shows that men initiate salary negotiations much more than women, and when women do negotiate, they ask for less than their male counterparts.