The following is excerpted from Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. Reprinted with permission.
Women don't ask. They don't ask for raises and promotions and better job opportunities. They don't ask for more help at home. And when they do ask, they don't ask for enough or for as much as they could get. In other words, women are much less likely than men to enter into negotiations to get what they want. Why is this important? Although negotiation has always been an important workplace skill, it has long been thought to be the province of men: a competitive realm in which men excelled and women felt less capable. But ideas about what make a successful negotiation have changed in recent years. Rather than a battle between adversaries, negotiation has increasingly been seen as, ideally, a collaborative process aimed at finding the best solutions for everyone involved. This not only makes the process of negotiating more pleasant, it has been shown to produce superior agreements: Everyone walks away with more of what they want. This change in attitudes makes negotiation more attractive to women, because many women have disliked the competitive nature of much negotiation. In addition, people often reacted negatively to women behaving in competitive ways, making negotiation a less effective strategy for women to get what they want. The new understanding of how negotiating can be most productive has eased this problem. But why do women need to negotiate more now than before — and why is it good news that women can begin to discover their strength as negotiators? Recent changes in workplace culture are making it essential for women to exercise far more control over their careers than in the past. At the same time, ongoing changes in the roles women play at home force them to manage a clamor of conflicting commitments. In the midst of so much rapid-fire professional and personal change, the ability to negotiate has become more than merely a useful attribute. It's become a basic survival skill.
A brave new world of work
In many industries, and in offices of every size, businesses have become less bureaucratic, levels of hierarchy have become fewer and flatter, and job responsibilities and lines of report have become less formalized. Management styles have become less "top-down," less "command-and-control." Traditional job ladders have given way to more diffuse organizational structures and new business models seem to emerge daily. Employees, as a result, often find themselves with few hard-and-fast rules to follow about how things are run. Many organizations are also making increasing use of "idiosyncratic deals" (called I-deals). I-deals are customized employment contracts designed to meet the individual needs of employees. They can allow varying degrees of flexibility in travel requirements, hours worked, or rates of skill development for different people doing the same job. They put more elements of an employee's work-life "up for grabs." Although the number of mergers and acquisitions has declined from its height in the past decade, companies are still being bought, sold, and combined at a brisk pace, with a direct impact on thousands of workers each year. In most cases, workers whose companies are acquired by another firm must re-negotiate every aspect of their working life, from compensation, hours, and benefits, to titles, job responsibilities, and even office space. In addition, when two firms merge, a vast array of large and small issues must be resolved in order to integrate two different cultures and ways of doing business. Most workers' career experiences have also changed radically. Up until the middle of the twentieth century, many workers spent their entire careers at one organization. In today's economy, this is almost unknown. In the year 2000, about 25 percent of all workers in the U.S. had been with their employers for 12 months or less. The average amount of time all workers had been with their employers that same year was a meager 3.5 years. Between May 2001 and May 2002, 52.9 million workers in the U.S. were laid off, fired, or quit — meaning that 39 percent of the American workforce changed jobs during that one twelve-month period. Every time a worker changes jobs, he or she must be on the alert for new opportunities — and negotiate a new employment contract. The percentage of workers in the U.S. who are union members dropped precipitously in the past two decades. While 20.1 percent of U.S. workers were unionized in 1983, this figure had fallen to 13.5 percent by 2001 — a drop of 33 percent. Since unionized workers do not need to negotiate most aspects of their employment contracts, such as wages, benefits, job assignments, and vacation time, the implications of this reduction in union membership are staggering — thousands, perhaps millions, of people, many of them women, who have not been accustomed to negotiating on their own behalf must now do so. Women are also participating in the work force far more than ever before. Women in Western democracies are now almost as likely as men to work outside the home (in the year 2000 in the U.S., 76.8 percent of women aged 25 to 54 worked outside the home compared to 64 percent of women in that age group in 1980, a 20 percent increase in 20 years.) Women's share of self-employment also increased from 22 percent in 1976 to 38 percent in 2000, with a total of 3.8 million women in the U.S. self-employed in the year 2000. Women who run their own businesses must negotiate everything from consulting fees, real estate contracts and rates for subcontractors to their own benefit arrangements from insurance companies.
Multiple roles and conflicting commitments
Millions of women now find themselves playing more roles in their lives than ever before (employee, wife, co-worker, boss, mother, sister, daughter). On top of the demands of working and raising their own children, many adults — especially women — are bearing increasing responsibility for the care of their elderly parents. This frequently requires negotiating with doctors' offices, nursing homes, supplemental caregivers, insurance companies, government programs, their own employers, and their parents themselves. Between 40 and 50 percent of marriages now ending in divorce as well, making women more likely than in the past to find themselves self-supporting or supporting a family on their own. In the United States alone, almost 20 million people have been divorced. Half of them are women, and for most of them, in addition to the other dislocations and adjustments they must endure, divorce also means a drop in their standard of living. In The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and Economic Consequences For Women and Children in America, Lenore J. Weitzman estimates that women's standard of living falls by 73 percent on average after a divorce while men's rises by 42 percent on average. In addition, census data show that about 85 percent of all divorced women receive no alimony. The percentage of births to single mothers (out of all mothers) has risen steeply as well, from 10 percent in 1970 to 33 percent today. For both divorced women and single mothers who have never been married, shouldering the burden of child-rearing without a partner to share the work and decision-making means women must find other forms of support and assistance — sometimes from friends and relatives, often from their local, state, or federal government programs. Whatever the source, women must be prepared to actively pursue what they need to care for themselves and their children.
Miles to go
Over the past 35 years, affirmative action, changes in social norms, reduced gender discrimination, a decline in occupational segregation, and an increase in access to higher education for women all contributed to a dramatic improvement in women's economic status. Unfortunately, much of that progress slowed almost to a standstill in the 1990s. For full-time workers, the ratio of women's to men's annual earnings increased from 60.2 percent in 1980 to 71.6 percent in 1990, for example, but between 1990 and 2000 that ratio increased only 1.6 percentage points, from 71.6 percent to 73.2. Women's progress into positions of leadership in professions that were previously closed to them has also been far from complete. In Linda's field, economics, the percentage of female full professors doubled between 1981 and 1991 (from 3 percent to 6 percent) but still remains shockingly low and has remained flat ever since. (In 2001, women still made up only 6 percent of all economics full professors.) This is true even though 25 percent of all Ph.D.s in economics for the past two decades were awarded to women, meaning there have been plenty of women in the "pipeline" who were not allowed to advance. The number of women hired as college presidents has also slowed dramatically. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the percentage of college presidents who were women more than doubled, from 9.5 percent to 21.1 percent. But between 1998 and 2001, this percentage increased by only 1.8 percentage points. These stagnating figures suggest that we may have gotten as much mileage as possible out of the changes we've already made — and that new solutions need to be found if women's progress is to continue. One of these solutions must be a change in society's attitudes toward women who assert themselves. Another, we're convinced, is encouraging women to speak up for what they deserve — to recognize more opportunities in their circumstances, appreciate the value of their work, and negotiate for what they want.
Introduction: Women Don't Ask
A few years ago, when Linda was serving as the director of the Ph.D. program at her school, a delegation of women graduate students came to her office. Many of the male graduate students were teaching courses of their own, the women explained, while most of the female graduate students had been assigned to work as teaching assistants to regular faculty. Linda agreed that this didn't sound fair, and that afternoon she asked the associate dean who handled teaching assignments about the women's complaint. She received a simple answer: "I try to find teaching opportunities for any student who approaches me with a good idea for a course, the ability to teach, and a reasonable offer about what it will cost," he explained. "More men ask. The women just don't ask." The women just don't ask. This incident and the associate dean's explanation suggested to Linda the existence of a more pervasive problem. Could it be that women don't get more of the things they want in life in part because they don't think to ask for them? Are there external pressures that discourage women from asking as much as men do — and even keep them from realizing they can ask? Are women really less likely than men to ask for what they want? To explore this question, Linda conducted a study that looked at the starting salaries of students graduating from Carnegie Mellon with their masters degrees. When Linda looked exclusively at gender, the difference was fairly large: The starting salaries of the men were 7.6 percent or almost $4,000 higher on average than those of the women. Trying to explain this difference, Linda looked next at who had negotiated their salaries (who'd asked for more money) and who had simply accepted the initial offers they received. It turned out that only 7 percent of the female students had negotiated while 57 percent (eight times as many) of the men had asked for more money. Linda was particularly surprised to find such a dramatic difference between men and women at Carnegie Mellon because graduating students are strongly advised by the school's Career Services department to negotiate their job offers. Nonetheless, hardly any of the women did so. The most striking finding, however, was that the students who negotiated (almost all men) were able to increase their starting salaries by 7.4 percent on average, or $4,053 — almost the exact amount of the average difference between men's and women's starting pay. This suggests that the salary differences between the men and the women might have been eliminated if the women had negotiated their offers. Spurred on by this finding, Linda and two colleagues, Deborah Small and Michele Gelfand, designed another study to look at the propensity of men and women to ask for more than they are offered. They recruited students at Carnegie Mellon University for an experiment in which they told them they would be paid between $3 and $10 for playing Boggle™, a game by Milton Bradley. In Boggle™, players shake a cube of tile letters until all the letters fall into a grid at the bottom of the cube. They must then identify words that can be formed from the letters vertically, horizontally, or diagonally. Each research subject was asked to play four rounds of the game, and then an experimenter handed him or her $3 and said, "Here is $3. Is $3 okay?" If a subject asked for more money, the experimenters would pay them $10, but they would not give anyone more money if he or she just complained about the compensation (an indirect method of asking). The results were striking — almost nine times as many male as female subjects asked for additional payment. Both male and female subjects rated how well they'd played the game about equally, meaning that women didn't feel they should be paid less or should accept less because they'd played badly. There were also no gender differences in how much men and women complained about the compensation (there was plenty of complaining all around). The significant factor seemed to be that for men, unhappiness with what they were offered was more likely to make them try to fix their unhappiness — by asking for more. In a much larger study, Linda, Michele Gelfand, Deborah Small, and another colleague named Heidi Stayn conducted a survey of several hundred people with access to the Internet (subjects were paid $10 to log on to a web site and answer a series of questions). The survey asked respondents about the most recent negotiations they'd attempted or initiated (as opposed to negotiations they'd participated in that had been prompted or initiated by others). These results suggest that men are asking for things they want and initiating negotiations much more often than women — two or three times as often. Linda and her colleagues wanted to be sure that this discrepancy was not produced simply by memory lapses, however, so the survey also asked people about the next negotiation they planned to initiate. In keeping with the earlier findings, the negotiations planned by the women were much further in the future than those being planned by the men — one month ahead for women but only one week ahead for men. This means that men may be initiating four times as many negotiations as women. The sheer magnitude of this difference is dramatic, especially since respondents to the survey included people of all ages, from a wide range of professions, and with varied levels of education. It confirms that men really do take a more active approach than women to getting what they want by asking for it. The over 80 interviews we conducted in the process of writing this book — with men and women from Britain and Europe as well as the United States, and from a range of professions (including full-time mothers) — supported these findings. When asked to identify the last negotiation in which they participated, the majority of the women we talked to named an event several months in the past and described a recognized type of structured negotiation, such as buying a car. (The exceptions were women with small children, who uniformly said, "I negotiate with my kids all the time.") The majority of the men described an event that had occurred within the preceding week, and frequently identified more informal transactions, such as negotiating with their spouses over who would take the kids to soccer practice, with their bosses to pay for a larger-size rental car because of a strained back, or with a colleague about which parts of a joint project each participant would undertake. Men were also more likely to mention more ambiguous situations — situations that could be construed as negotiations but might not be by many people. For the most part, the men we talked to saw negotiation as a bigger part of their lives and a more common event than women. One particularly striking aspect of our findings was how they broke down by age. The changes brought about by the women's movement over the last 40 years had led us to expect greater differences between older men and women than between their younger counterparts. And indeed when we discuss the ideas in the book with younger women they often suggest that the problems we are studying are "boomer" problems, afflicting older women but not themselves. To our surprise, however, when we looked exclusively at respondents to the web survey who were in their 20s and early 30s, the gender differences in how often they initiated negotiations were similar to or slightly larger than the differences in older cohorts (with men attempting many more negotiations than women) . In addition, both the starting salary study and the Boggle™ study used subjects who were in their 20s. This persuaded us that the tendency among women to accept what they're offered and not ask for more is far from just a "boomer" problem.
