Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tite.

Coming up on the show this time, the nuances of negotiating, is a female manager less likely to advocate for a woman employee than a male boss?

Even in her position, she felt like she had gotten by with not having a raise in three years,

so that should be okay.

And we return to the topic of women in technology and ask why so many women at technology

firms manage projects or people rather than write code.

We see that kind of caretaking work as primarily women's domain

and I think also as less valuable because historically it's been done by women.

Coming up on the broad experience. A few months ago I read a blog post by Ashley Weldy. She runs her own research

company, JLW Ventures. In her post, Ashley raised a fascinating possibility one I'd never considered

in the reporting I've already done

on negotiating and how much women underpriced themselves, that female bosses may do a worse

job of being your advocate when you're a woman yourself. I got on the phone with Ashley and asked

her to tell more of the story that led her to this conclusion. Back in the late 90s, she graduated from business school and landed a job at a big corporation.

A year later, the firm introduced an official MBA intake program and brought on a whole bunch of business school graduates.

And everyone got the same starting salary, which was about 25,000 more than I had made.

So there she was, with the same business school experience

and having already clocked up a year on the job,

she went to her boss, who happened to be female.

And she presented her case.

She laid out the work she'd done at the company that year,

...