W O M E N D O N ’ T A S K
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Copyright © 2003 by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever
Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,
Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Babcock, Linda, 1961–
Women don’t ask : negotiation and the gender divide / Linda Babcock
and Sara Laschever.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-691-08940-X
1. Negotiation in business. 2. Businesswomen.
I. Laschever, Sara, 1957– II. Title.
HD58.6.B33
2003
650.1′3′082—dc21
2003049842
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE
This book has been composed in Berkeley Book
Printed on acid-free paper.∞
www.pupress.princeton.edu
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
For our children, Alexandra, Moses, and Adam,
in the hope that they will grow up in a world more accepting
of women who ask
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C O N T E N T S
PREFACE: Why Negotiation, and Why Now?
ix
INTRODUCTION: Women Don’t Ask
1
CHAPTER ONE: Opportunity Doesn’t Always Knock
17
CHAPTER TWO: A Price Higher than Rubies
41
CHAPTER THREE: Nice Girls Don’t Ask
62
CHAPTER FOUR: Scaring the Boys
85
CHAPTER FIVE: Fear of Asking
112
CHAPTER SIX: Low Goals and Safe Targets
130
CHAPTER SEVEN: Just So Much and No More
148
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Female Advantage
164
EPILOGUE: Negotiating at Home
180
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
187
NOTES
189
REFERENCES
201
INDEX
217
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P R E FA C E
Why Negotiation, and Why Now?
Women don’t ask. They don’t ask for raises and promotions and
better job opportunities. They don’t ask for recognition for the
good work they do. They don’t ask for more help at home. In other
words, women are much less likely than men to use negotiation to get
what they want. Why does this matter? 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 negoti-
ation have changed in recent years. Rather than a battle between adver-
saries, 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 less combative, it has been
shown to produce superior agreements: Everyone walks away with
more of what he or she wants.
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 react negatively to women
behaving in competitive ways, making negotiation a less effective strat-
egy for women to get what they want. The new understanding of negoti-
ation as a collaborative process 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. The rise of Internet-based commerce, especially the boom in on-
line auction and trading sites, has created a whole new realm for buying,
selling, and doing business—further changing the landscape in which
women live and work. At the same time, ongoing changes in the roles
women play at home force them to manage a clamor of conflicting com-
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mitments in their lives. In the midst of so much rapid-fire professional
and personal change, negotiation is no longer optional. 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.1
Management styles have become less “top-down,” less “command-and-
control.” Traditional job ladders have given way to more diffuse organi-
zational structures and new business models seem to emerge daily. Em-
ployees, 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 de-
signed to meet the individual needs of employees. They can allow vary-
ing degrees of flexibility in travel requirements, hours worked, or rates
of skill development for different people doing the same job. They make
more elements of an employee’s work life negotiable.2
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 ac-
quired by other firms must renegotiate every aspect of their working
lives, from compensation, hours, and benefits to titles, job responsibili-
ties, 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 extremely
rare. In the year 2000, about 25 percent of all workers in the United
States 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.3 Between May 2001 and May 2002, 52.9
million workers in the United States were laid off, fired, or quit—mean-
ing that 39 percent of the American work force changed jobs during
that one twelve-month period.4 Every time a worker changes jobs, he
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or she must be on the alert f
or new opportunities—and must negotiate
a new employment contract.
The percentage of workers in the United States who are union mem-
bers has also dropped precipitously. Whereas 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.5 Since unionized workers do not need
to negotiate most aspects of their employment, 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 nego-
tiating on their own behalf must now do so.
More women are also participating in the work force than at any time
in recent memory. In the year 2000 in the United States, 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.6 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 United States self-employed in the year 2000.7 Women
who run their own businesses must negotiate everything from con-
sulting fees, real estate contracts, and rates for subcontractors to their
own benefit arrangements from insurance companies.
Multiple Roles and Conflicting Commitments
As more and more women work outside the home, millions of them
must play more roles in their lives than ever before (boss, coworker,
employee, daughter, wife, mother, friend). On top of the demands of
working and raising their own children, many adults—especially
women—bear increasing responsibility for the care of their elderly par-
ents. 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 end in divorce as well,
making women more likely than in the past to find themselves self-
supporting or supporting a family by themselves.8 In the United States
alone, almost 20 million people have been divorced.9 Half of them are
women, and for most of them, in addition to the other dislocations and
adjustments they must endure, divorce means a sudden drop in their
standard of living.10 In The Divorce Revolution: The Unexpected Social and xi
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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.
Census data also 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.11 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 finding other
forms of support and assistance—sometimes from friends and relatives,
often from 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. But our as-
sumptions about women’s progress often far outstrip reality. 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, but between 1990 and
2000 that ratio increased only 1.6 percentage points, from 71.6 percent
to 73.2.12
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 dou-
bled 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 full professors in economics.)
This is true even though 25 percent of all Ph.D.s in economics for the
past two decades were awarded to women, meaning that there have
been plenty of women in the “pipeline” who were not allowed to ad-
vance.13 The number of women hired as college presidents has also
* Because we wrote this book together, when we describe incidents from our own lives we refer to ourselves by our first names, as Linda and Sara.
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slowed. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, the percentage of col-
lege 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.14
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, will come from en-
couraging women to speak up for what they deserve—to recognize
more opportunities in their circumstances, appreciate the value of their
work, and ask for what they want.
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W O M E N D O N ’ T A S K
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
Women Don’t Ask
Afewyearsago,whenLindawasservingasthedirectorofthePh.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 after-
noon 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 that they can ask? Are women really
less likel
y 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 University
with their master’s degrees.1 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 negoti-
ated his or her salary (who had asked for more money) and who had
simply accepted the initial offer he or she had received. It turned out
that only 7 percent of the female students had negotiated but 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
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strongly advised by the school’s Career Services department to negotiate
their job offers. Nonetheless, hardly any of the women had done so.
The most striking finding, however, was that the students who had
negotiated (most of them men) were able to increase their starting sala-
ries by 7.4 percent on average, or $4,053—almost exactly the difference
between men’s and women’s average 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.2 They re-
cruited students at Carnegie Mellon for an experiment and told them
that they would be paid between three and ten dollars 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 verti-
cally, horizontally, or diagonally. Each research subject was asked to
play four rounds of the game, and then an experimenter handed him or
her three dollars and said, “Here’s three dollars. Is three dollars okay?” If
a subject asked for more money, the experimenters would pay that
participant ten dollars, but they would not give anyone more money if
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