Women Don't Ask

by Linda Babcock

  different salary histories are rated differently by employers. If your

  compensation record is better than others, employers will assume

  that your performance is better too. . . . Accepting less will imply

  that you have less value than other new hires.16

  In many cases, employers actually respect candidates more for push-

  ing to get paid what they’re worth. This means that women don’t merely

  sacrifice additional income when they don’t push to be paid more, they

  may sacrifice some of their employers’ regard too. The experience of

  Hope, a business school professor, tells this story clearly. When she

  completed graduate school, Hope was offered a job at a prestigious

  management consulting firm. Not wanting to “start off on the wrong

  foot,” she accepted the firm’s initial salary offer without asking for more.

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  W O M E N D O N ’ T A S K

  Although she feared that negotiating her salary would damage her new

  bosses’ impression of her, the opposite occurred: She later learned that

  her failure to negotiate almost convinced the senior management team

  that they’d made a mistake in hiring her.

  Similarly, Ellen, 44, a senior partner at a large law firm, was checking

  the references of an experienced paralegal named Lucy whom she

  wanted to hire. One of Lucy’s former supervisors described a long list

  of Lucy’s strengths and recommended her highly. But when Ellen asked

  about Lucy’s weaknesses, the supervisor said that Lucy could be more

  assertive. Ellen asked if she meant Lucy needed to be more assertive on

  behalf of the firm’s clients. The supervisor said no, Lucy was terrific at

  tracking down any information that could benefit a client’s case. What

  she meant, the supervisor explained, was that Lucy needed to be more

  assertive on her own behalf. “She could be a lot more assertive when it

  comes to her own professional needs and rewards,” the woman ex-

  plained. This supervisor felt that not asking for more on her own behalf

  was a professional weakness in Lucy—and a serious enough weakness

  that she mentioned it when providing an otherwise glowing reference.

  Women also make sacrifices in their personal lives by not asking for

  what they need more of the time. Miriam, 46, an architect, is also mar-

  ried to an architect. But whereas her husband works for an internation-

  ally known firm and travels regularly for his job, Miriam works for

  herself. And because they have two children, she restricts herself to

  residential projects in her home state. When her children were small,

  her husband was out of town two to five days a week, and she was

  taking care of the children pretty much by herself. Although she en-

  joyed a lot of artistic freedom in her work and built up a successful

  practice constructing two- and three-million-dollar houses (houses that

  won awards and were featured in design magazines), the demands of

  her family life felt crushing. “I just felt like this is the way that life is for me and there is not anything that I can do about this.” Now she wonders

  “if there would have been ways of asking for more help” instead of

  “working and working until I fell apart.” The problem was that “asking

  didn’t really seem like a possibility, but I’m sure that it was.”

  Missing the Chance

  Besides not realizing that asking is possible, many women avoid negoti-

  ating even in situations in which they know that negotiation is appro-

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  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  priate and expected (like the female students in the starting salary

  study). In another one of Linda’s studies, 20 percent of the women

  polled said that they never negotiate at all.17 Although this seems un-

  likely (perhaps these women think of their negotiations as something

  else, such as “problem-solving” or “compromising” or even “going along

  to get along”), their statement conveys a strong antipathy toward negoti-

  ating among a huge number of women. (In the United States alone, 20

  percent of the female adult population equals 22 million people.)

  That many women feel uncomfortable using negotiation to advance

  their interests—and feel more uncomfortable on average than men—

  was confirmed by a section of Linda’s Internet survey. This part of the

  survey asked respondents to consider various scenarios and indicate

  whether they thought negotiation would be appropriate in the situa-

  tions described. In situations in which they thought negotiation was

  appropriate, respondents were also asked to report how likely they

  would be to negotiate in that situation. Particularly around work scenar-

  ios, such as thinking they were due for a promotion or a salary increase,

  women as a group were less likely to try to negotiate than men—even

  though they recognized that negotiation was appropriate and probably

  even necessary.18

  These findings are momentous because until now research on negoti-

  ation has mostly ignored the issue of when and why people attempt to

  negotiate, focusing instead on tactics that are successful once a negotia-

  tion is underway—what kinds of offers to make, when to concede, and

  which strategies are most effective in different types of negotiations.19

  With few exceptions, researchers have ignored the crucial fact that the

  most important step in any negotiation process must be deciding to

  negotiate in the first place.20 Asking for what you want is the essential

  first step that “kicks off” a negotiation. If you miss your chance to nego-

  tiate, the best negotiation advice in the world isn’t going to help you

  much. And women simply aren’t “asking” at the same rate as men.

  A New Perspective

  Our goal in this book is to explore the causes of this difference between

  men and women, using “asking” as a lens through which to examine

  how women negotiate life in the broadest sense. In the following pages,

  we will examine why many women often don’t realize that change is

  possible—why they don’t know that they can ask. We will look at the

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  social forces that school women, from the time they are very young, to

  focus on the needs of others rather than on their own needs. And we will

  show how our shared assumptions, as a society, about what constitutes

  appropriate female behavior can act as a kind of psychological strait-

  jacket when a woman wants to assert her own wishes and desires.

  Despite recent gains made by women in many realms and the com-

  parative openness of Western democracies to progress, our society still

  perpetuates rigid gender-based standards for behavior—standards that

  require women to behave modestly and unselfishly and to avoid pro-

  moting their own self-interest. New generations of children are taught

  to abide by and internalize these standards, making them less likely as

  adults to rebel against these common beliefs. In addition, women who

  do rebel against these standards by pushing more overtly on their own

  behalf often risk being punished. Sometimes they’re called “pushy” or

  “bitchy” or “
difficult to work with.” Sometimes their skills and contribu-

  tions are undervalued and they’re passed over for promotions they de-

  serve. Other times, they’re left out of information-sharing networks.

  Experiencing this treatment themselves or seeing other women treated

  this way, many women struggle with intense anxiety when they con-

  sider asking for something they want—anxiety that can deter them from

  asking at all or interfere with their ability to ask well.

  In addition, even when women do negotiate, they often get less than

  a man in the same situation might get. Sometimes this happens because

  women set less aggressive goals going into their negotiations than men

  set and sometimes it happens because both men and women in our

  society typically take a harder line against women than they take against

  men in a negotiation. They make worse first offers to women, pressure

  women to concede more, and themselves concede much less. This

  doesn’t simply limit the results women produce when they do negotiate.

  If the benefits from negotiating are likely to be small and the process

  promises to be difficult, many women feel less incentive to ask in the

  first place.

  By exposing the social forces that constrain women from promoting

  their own interests and limit them from getting more when they try, we

  hope to make it easier for women to do things differently. We’re con-

  vinced that for behavior to change women must understand, at a very

  deep level, the forces that shape their beliefs, attitudes, and impulses.

  Simply telling women what they should do differently without helping

  them understand the root causes of their behavior will make women

  feel anxious and inadequate, we suspect, but won’t help them achieve

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  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  meaningful change. So in the pages that follow we explore the many

  causes and ramifications of this newly recognized problem.

  Working from this foundation, we also describe in every chapter

  ways in which women can resist and even retool their early social train-

  ing, reframe their interactions with others, and overcome the low sense

  of entitlement, fear, or extreme caution that can keep them from taking

  full advantage of their talents. We don’t mean to imply that this problem

  has a simple solution, however—that women just need to wake up and

  ask for things more of the time and the problem will go away. Women

  tend to hesitate before asking for what they want not because of a silly

  blind spot that’s entirely their own responsibility but because they are

  taught early on that pushing on their own behalf is unfeminine, unat-

  tractive, and unwelcome—not to mention ineffective.

  So we want to be clear: This book is not simply a study of an inexpli-

  cable female failing that can easily be corrected. It is not about ways in

  which women need to “fix” themselves. It is an examination of how our

  culture—modern Western culture—strongly discourages women from

  asking for what they want. (The situations of women in other parts of

  the world bear many similarities to those of women in the West, but

  they’re beyond the scope of this book). We hope it will help individual

  women improve their circumstances and increase their happiness. But

  even more, we hope it will provoke social change on a larger scale by

  inspiring everyone—in the workforce and at home—to think differently

  about how women can and should behave. To this end, we also include

  suggestions for how managers in the workplace and adults both at work

  and at home can change their behavior toward the women around

  them. Until society accepts that it is a good thing for women to promote

  their own interests and negotiate on their own behalf, women will con-

  tinue to find it difficult to pursue their dreams and ambitions in

  straightforward and effective ways. And we’ll show that preventing

  women from doing so involves substantial social and economic costs

  for us all.

  Affirming the Right to Ask

  Can women learn to recognize more hidden opportunities in their cir-

  cumstances—and can the world learn to accept women who ask? Can

  women overcome their anxiety and find effective ways to negotiate—

  and can people stop taking a harder line when they negotiate with

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  W O M E N D O N ’ T A S K

  women? Luckily, the answer to all of these questions is yes. Recognizing

  more opportunities for negotiation in your circumstances is a skill that

  can be learned—in many cases quite easily. In the three years we spent

  writing this book, we discussed our ideas with many women who went

  out and applied them in their lives, with dramatic results (many of their

  stories appear in the chapters that follow). Research also shows that

  certain kinds of training can help women become more effective negoti-

  ators (and can substantially decrease their anxiety) by increasing their

  sense of control over the negotiation process and teaching them to antic-

  ipate roadblocks, plan countermoves, and resist conceding too much or

  too soon. Rather than merely imitating men (which often doesn’t work),

  women can learn to ask as women. They can find their own “negotiating

  voices,” develop more ambitious goals—and get good results.

  Society can also change. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping

  Point, describes how New York City dramatically reduced its crime rate in a very short time by making crime seem less permissible in the streets

  of New York. The city did this by cleaning up those streets—eradicating

  graffiti, replacing broken windows, removing garbage—and by crack-

  ing down on even the most minor crimes, such as fare-jumping in the

  subways. Through these seemingly small changes, the city was able to

  achieve a profound cultural shift: It was able to change people’s behav-

  ior. People with the same deprived backgrounds or bad motives—what-

  ever drives people into crime—stopped committing criminal acts sim-

  ply because small changes in their environment signaled that such

  behavior was no longer appropriate there. As Gladwell writes, “We like

  to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we

  are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and

  our temperament.”21 Instead, he shows, “We are actually powerfully

  influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the per-

  sonalities of those around us.”22

  Similarly, changing the context and the cultural environment in

  which women live and work can change the behavior of the people who

  live and work with them, making certain ways of responding to women

  seem less permissible. This type of change can be achieved by a few

  people in a group consciously deciding to treat men and women more

  equally—and by their example influencing the behavior and beliefs of

  others. It can be achieved by men in positions of power making a com-

  mitment to mentoring talented women. It can be achieved by a lot of

  people paying closer attention to the different ways in which they treat

  men and women and raise their male and female childre
n.

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  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  Gladwell calls rapid, large-scale social changes (such as the crime

  reduction in New York) social “epidemics.” As The Tipping Point demonstrates, epidemics of social change are rarely the result of a single, uni-

  fied effort by millions of people. Because subtle adjustments in their

  circumstances can strongly influence people’s beliefs and behavior, even

  small changes sometimes have a “multiplier” effect. Or, as Gladwell

  writes, “big changes follow from small events.”23 We hope this book will

  prompt an epidemic of small changes and lead to a genuine loosening of

  the constraints that bind women.

  This is not to say that change on a larger scale is not possible as well.

  One organization, the international accounting and consulting firm of

  Deloitte and Touche, which employs about 29,000 people in the United

  States and a total of 95,000 worldwide, has already demonstrated that

  with hard work and commitment large-scale cultural change is also

  possible. In 1991, Deloitte and Touche decided that it had a problem

  concerning women. Only 5 percent of the firm’s partners were women,

  and even though it had been hiring large numbers of women since

  1980, by 1991 only 8 percent of the new candidates for partner were

  female.24 A task force formed to look into the problem discovered that

  so few women were coming up for partnerships because most of them

  were leaving before they qualified for partner. The average annual turn-

  over rate among female managers was huge: 33 percent. The task force

  also calculated that every percentage point in turnover translated into

  an estimated 13 million dollars for costs such as recruitment, hiring

  bonuses, and training. Although the members of the task force assumed

  that women were leaving Deloitte and Touche to stay home and have

  children, they quickly learned that this was not the case. Women were

  not leaving to stay home but were moving to other firms. When polled,

  women cited Deloitte and Touche’s male-dominated culture as a big

  reason for leaving: The company was just not a comfortable place for

  women to work. The task force also found that within the firm, both

  men and women wanted the freedom to balance work and family better.

  No one wanted what was then the standard 80-hour work week.