A number of studies conclude that women tend to accept an initial salary offer rather than try to negotiate a higher number. Men, meanwhile, are more willing to haggle to get what they want.
The results are:
- Over the course of their careers, women can leave significant salary money on the table.
- Organizations damage themselves by not recognizing this reality and doing something about it.
“Left unchecked, gender disparities in negotiation quickly transform into clear pay and promotion inequalities and costly employee turnover,” according to Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, writing The Costs of Not Negotiating on Harvard Business Publishing.
The authors present a case where a woman foregoes $1.6 million by the end of her career compared with a male colleague based upon her very first salary negotiation out of business school.
Just as women try to avoid negotiating pay, they may also not speak up when plum assignments are handed out.
That women negotiate differently than men is well known. But what I particularly liked about this post was the idea that organizations have a real stake in ensuring equality is served. It includes a number of tips for what managers can do. Here’s one:
“Even managers who genuinely care about the advancement of women will discriminate unknowingly if they hand out assignments primarily to those who ask for them, because men tend to ask more than women do. By stopping to think whenever a man asks for an assignment whether he will do the best job or whether a woman who hasn’t asked might do the job better, managers can begin to right some of the imbalances created by men’s greater propensity to ask for what they want.”
To delve a little deeper into the complexities of gender-based negotiation, check out this Harvard Business School Working Knowledge interview with researchers Dina W. Pradel, Hannah Riley Bowles, and Kathleen L. McGinn, When Gender Changes the Negotiation. Their point: Gender is not a good predictor of negotiation performance, but ambiguous situations can trigger different behaviors by men and women — especially highly competitive situations.
Do you believe this research that men are more willing than women to speak up for themselves? What can women do to avoid this trap?
