Well said! As a corporate salesperson for a tech company, I learned quickly that you will not get a higher salary unless you ask for it. But if you ask for it, and you have the results to back it up, you are likely to get what you want or at the very least get more than what you have.

For example, when I started my job at my current company I found out after a couple of months that a male colleague was making $5k more than me in his base salary despite performing much worse than I was. I went to my boss and said "hey I know that so and so is making X amount, I deserve to be making at least as much as him don't you agree? Given that I have delivered consistently much higher results?"

And you know what happened? My boss said "you're right, let me see what I can do", and a few months later I wound up with a $10k boost to my base salary. That's right, double what I'd asked for.

When I was promoted, I asked for a pay rise and my base salary was raised again. A year later I was head hunted by another company, offered a higher salary than I was currently making at my job. However I wanted to stay working at my current company because the culture was better. So I went to my boss and said "hey, I am being headhunted by this really attractive job, they are offering me X amount, I thought I would give you the option to try and convince me to stay here". And they raised my salary again so it was in line with the other offer I had, and also they gave me some other perks on top of that including a free trip to the Philippines and the ability to branch out and do some other interesting projects I wanted to do.

I was able to do this because:

- I was consistently the best performing salesperson in the team

- Good salespeople with proven track records and good company fit are hard to find and replace, finding someone to replace me would cost more in recruitment fees and opportunity cost than it would to agree to my request, and there's no guarantee my replacement would be any good (in my job half the people recruited tend to leave within 6 months or are poor performers)

- The fact I was negotiating with them proved that I was a good salesperson and a good negotiator which is what they wanted me to be to their customers

I truly believe that the biggest influence on whether women get paid less than men in these kind of jobs is that we don't ask for a pay rise. We think it's inappropriate or entitled. But it's not. If you have the results to back it up, be confident. Make sure you have a plan B if it doesn't work out (like the other job I had an offer from).

This doesn't apply to minimum wage jobs, but it does apply for industries where recruitment is costly - a smart boss will almost always want to keep a good worker rather than take a chance on an unknown. So you have leverage.

Good luck out there!