In Leize Dolgih’s article: Negotiating Employment Agreements or the Real Reason Jennifer Lawrence Got Paid Less Than Bradley Cooper, she emphasizes “the cardinal rule of employment negotiations – IF YOU DO NOT ASK FOR IT, YOU WILL NOT GET IT.” This is great advice, but it’s not helpful. We already know this.

Luckily, Jennifer Lawrence’s openness about what happened to her let’s us help her, and ourselves, identify better advice. Jennifer said she didn’t want to seem this way or that way or haggle about money she didn’t need. But she sounded like she wasn’t sure.

My advice: Get some help finding out what you want and how to ask for it. Then you’ll be able to ask for it, and relax.

When you realize what you really want, you’ll relax.

Now, she realizes that she also wanted her salary to be fair. So besides negotiating a sufficient salary, she should have asked for fairness. Maybe that means her salary should be at least the salary of the lower of the top two male leads. Or maybe she should have asked for the average of the female leads salaries to be the same as the average of the male leads.

Do you see the difference between asking for more money and asking for fairness? She was getting enough money. But she wanted fairness, too.

PeopleCount is based on identifying what we want– a government that’s accountable to the people. Yet we ask for anti-corruption laws, campaign finance laws, constitutional amendments to alter court decisions and more. We’re trying to manipulate the laws to get rid of corruption and injustice. That’s all good. But we should also be building what we want, a system that delivers accountability.

So if you want salary, ask for salary. If you want fairness, ask for fairness, too. If you want government that’s accountable to people, support PeopleCount.org.