Women Don't Ask
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actually function as a kind of self-fulfilling expectation—exerting pres-
sure on men and women to develop the characteristics and skills needed
to perform the jobs to which they’ve been assigned. As Alice Eagly dem-
onstrated in her influential book Sex Differences in Social Behavior: A
Social Role Interpretation, being given certain types of jobs forces women to develop the skills those jobs require.12 The same is obviously also
true of men, who in many cases must develop more male-identified
skills and cannot make use of the more female-identified traits in their
personalities.
But we’ve become so self-conscious about gender roles and gender
stereotypes in recent years, you may say, how can we still be perpetuat-
ing them? How do well-loved little girls, given every material advantage
and offered opportunities never dreamt of by their female ancestors,
grow up to display the same lower sense of entitlement felt by their
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mothers and grandmothers? That we do perpetuate it is inarguable:
Our research observed gender gaps in entitlement for men and women
currently 35 and younger that were equal to those for older genera-
tions.13 This means that younger women are just as likely as their older
peers to feel unsure about what they deserve—and to feel uncomfort-
able asking for more than they have.
Two major social forces seem to be responsible for the stubborn per-
sistence of gender-linked norms and beliefs. The first involves the so-
cialization and development of children and the second involves the
maintenance of gender roles by adults.
The Socialization of Children
A line of child development research has identified a process of “sex-
typing,” through which each new generation of children is taught
roles and beliefs by previously socialized members of the society.14
The developmental psychologist Eleanor Maccoby describes the pre-
sumed sequence of events: “Adult socialization agents and older chil-
dren treat children of the two sexes somewhat differently, using rein-
forcement, punishment, and example to foster whatever behaviors and
attitudes a social group deems sex-appropriate. Socialization pressures
are also applied to inhibit sex-inappropriate attitudes and behavior. The
result of this differential socialization is that boys and girls, on the aver-
age, develop somewhat different personality traits, skills, and activity
preferences.”15
We heard many stories about the powerful pressure that gender ste-
reotypes exert on women’s sense of entitlement. Adele, 65, a retired
financial consultant, said that she was “taught from a very young age
that asking for anything was like begging and that ‘good girls’ didn’t
beg.” As a result, Adele never once in the course of her long career asked
for a raise. Instead, she taught herself to avoid thinking about the things
she wanted. This protected her from disappointment, but it also im-
paired her ability to judge what her work was worth—her sense of
personal entitlement was almost totally suppressed. Needless to say, not
thinking about what she wanted also made her considerably less fo-
cused and effective at getting promotions, rewards, and opportunities
that she might have deserved and enjoyed.
Lisa, the animal hospital receptionist-manager, says that when she
was growing up, “girls were really taught to defer to people, to—you
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know—be polite, be kind, be compassionate, be considerate. You’re
always taking second place to the needs of others. . . . The messages are
so strong, and you’re so absorbent of them when you’re so young that
I fight that second nature a lot.”
Miriam, the architect, said “I’ve been told all of my life . . . that if I
have something then I should give it to someone else. I think that is
what women and girls are taught—to be generous and give—and boys
I think are taught to defend themselves and keep and ask.” Brian, the
intensive-care nurse, agrees: “I think I’m better, generally [as a negotia-
tor]. . . . I almost think part of that’s a sort of societal conditioning, that as a man I have been raised with this sense of entitlement, that I should
get what I want. And I almost think that societally women are condi-
tioned that you don’t always get what you want.”
One of the things men are conditioned to think they should get is
money. Becky, 50, a journalist, recalls that when she was a child her
brother was given gifts of stocks but she was given dresses. This taught
her brother very early on that the world of money and high finance
were his rightful home, while she received the message that this was
not to be her territory. This is a message—that money is outside their
provenance—that girls and women get from all directions. They get it
at home (remember Linda’s daughter asking if girls have money or if
it’s just boys who have money?). They get it at school from teachers who
let them know (often without realizing it) that girls are not expected to
do well at math. And they get it from the media.
A 1999 study revealed, for example, that the percentage of women
used as experts in business and economic newscasts on the three major
television networks that year averaged a mere 18 percent (CBS used
women as financial experts only 11 percent of the time); only 31 percent
of all business and economic news stories on the networks were filed
by female correspondents. The print media were no better. That same
year, in Time magazine, only 11 percent of the authors of business and economic news stories were women, in Newsweek male sources cited in
financial news articles outnumbered female sources seven to one, and
in Business Week financial articles about influential individuals focused on men 92 percent of the time.16 Even a child who is not interested in
pursuing a profession in the financial world cannot avoid the none-too-
subtle message that money is a man’s business. This may make her feel
less entitled as an adult to ask for more money than she’s offered be-
cause she does not see herself as a part of the world in which people
make a lot of money.
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Girls learn other lessons about what they can do from popular cul-
ture. A few years ago, the Sesame Workshop, creators of Sesame Street
and other educational children’s television programming, launched a
cartoon called Dragon Tales aimed at preschool children. The show follows the adventures of a young brother and sister who regularly visit a
fantasy place called Dragonland to play with a group of friendly drag-
ons. Their adventures are designed to help children learn how to work
and play together, share, and solve problems. In one episode, the sister,
Emmy, discovers on her arrival in Dragonland that her girl dragon
friends are all members of the Dragon Scouts. Emmy wants to become
a scout, too, but for reasons that go unexplained she avoids the obvious
route of simply asking her friends if she can join. Instead, she lingers
while her friends work on various scout projects, trying to help them
and being coy about what she wants. Finally, at the end of the show,
her friends invite her to join them, which the show presents as a victory
for her approach. The message to little girls could not be clearer: Being
coy and indirect about what you want and waiting rather than asking
is an effective strategy—more than that, it is the appropriate strategy,
and superior to directly articulating your wants and wishes.
Other messages come from children’s books and movies. The classic
Make Way for Ducklings, beloved by generations of children, tells the
story of Mr. and Mrs. Mallard, a pair of “married” ducks. After much
searching, the Mallards find a spot to nest, lay their eggs, and molt on an
island in Boston’s Charles River. Once the ducklings hatch, Mr. Mallard
decides he wants to explore the river and departs for a week, leaving
Mrs. Mallard behind to “raise the kids.” While he’s gone, she teaches
them how to swim, dive for food at the bottom of the river, and walk
in a line. From stories like this, children learn that men are free to
pursue their own interests and satisfy their personal desires, but com-
munal responsibilities must dominate women’s actions.
A more recent example comes from the two Toy Story movies, much
favored by moms and dads because they are imaginative, they include
little violence, and, unlike many movies for children, they don’t start
with the death of a parent. In both movies, a toy is stranded outside
the security of the child’s home in which the community of toys resides.
In each case, rescuers venture out to retrieve the lost toy, and in each
case, male toys embark on the rescue mission while the female toys wait
behind. The behavior of the female toys conforms closely to gender role
norms for girls in other ways as well. Bo Peep, in the first movie, remains
loyal to Woody (the “head” or alpha toy in the group because he has
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been the child’s favorite) even though Woody appears to have purposely
flipped a new toy, Buzz Lightyear, out the window because he threat-
ened his status. In Toy Story 2, after Woody has been stolen by a greedy toy collector, Mrs. Potato Head packs up supplies for Mr. Potato Head
to take on the rescue mission, fussily including all sorts of things he
may need to stay well-fed and safe. The message is clear: Men get to be
the self-assertive risk-takers, while women are relegated to more sec-
ondary, other-directed roles. The second movie does include a feisty
female character, Jesse, a cowgirl doll, but even she needs to be rescued
by the male toys in the end.
A few powerful female characters have appeared on children’s televi-
sion in recent years, such as Xena: Warrior Princess, and the Powerpuff
Girls. Nonetheless, recent studies report that of the 123 characters girls
who watch children’s programming on Saturday mornings may en-
counter, only 23 percent are female. Of the major characters, only 18
percent are female.17 This tells girls that they are not the principal
“actors” in life’s dramas and that it is boys or men who take center
stage in the world and make things happen. Girls play bystanders or
supporting characters. This lesson is not likely to encourage girls to step
forward and grab what they want for themselves; instead, it teaches
them to watch and wait and accept whatever comes their way.
Computer and video games—many more of which are designed for
boys than for girls—also promote gender-appropriate attitudes by culti-
vating “agentic” skills such as competitiveness, aggression, and self-in-
terest at the expense of others.18 In most of these games, the action
figures are boys and the few girls appear as scantily clothed props.19
This distribution of roles reinforces the notion that it is appropriate for
boys to strive for success (by “winning” or achieving the highest score)
but girls should remain decorative and passive. “Old-fashioned” toys
are sex-typed as well—and widely recognized as such. “Girls’ toys” in-
clude dolls and kitchen equipment (play ovens, tea sets, dishes); “boys’
toys” include vehicles (cars, trains, planes) and construction sets
(blocks, trucks, Lincoln Logs). Adults not only prefer to see their chil-
dren play with “sex-appropriate toys” like these, they communicate this
message so effectively that even when children are unconstrained they
choose sex-typed toys the majority of the time.20 Girls learn from the
toys they receive that it is important for them to take care of others—
bathing and dressing their doll “babies,” serving “tea” to friends, prepar-
ing food and cleaning up after meals. Boys learn from their transporta-
tion toys that they can move freely through the world and from their
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construction toys that they can define the earth around them by con-
structing buildings, roads, and complicated machinery. The net effect
of this “toy-coding” is to teach girls to subordinate their needs to the
needs of others and to teach boys to take charge of their environment.
Through these and related forms of socialization, stereotypes and
gender-role ideas take hold very early in a child’s consciousness. In
the “pay allocation” studies described in chapter 2, for example, the
researchers consistently replicated the adult gender gap in entitlement
among schoolchildren. Using first, fourth, seventh, and tenth graders
(with Hershey’s kisses instead of money for the first graders), the re-
searchers found that in every grade, girls paid themselves less than boys
paid themselves—between 30 and 78 percent less. Again, the research-
ers found no gender differences in the children’s evaluations of how
well they thought they’d performed the set task.21 Even more to the
point, perhaps, the amounts girls paid themselves correlated positively
with the perceived “masculinity” or “femininity” of their occupation
preferences. Girls who indicated that they preferred “male-dominated”
occupations such as firefighter, astronaut, or police officer paid them-
selves more than girls who indicated that they preferred “female” occu-
pations such as secretary, nurse, and teacher. This suggests that the
extent to which girls identify with traditional female roles influences
their level of perceived entitlement.
The different messages boys and girls receive growing up may also
affect their self-esteem, with research suggesting that women as a group
have lower levels of self-esteem than men do.22 Scholars have proposed
numerous causes for this, with some sources blaming a bombardment
of anti-female messages in the media. Whatever the causes, they don’t
seem to be genetic: After an extensive review of the existing literature
on gender and self-esteem, the psychologists Kristen Kling, Janet
Shelby-Hyde, Carolin Showers, and Brenda Buswell concluded that the
different socialization messages boys and girls receive from our culture
seem to be responsible. Boys are “expected to develop self-confidence,”
they write, “whereas displaying self-confidence has traditionally been a
gender-role violation for girls.”23 Believing that you’re good at what you
do, assuming that you deserve to be amply rewarded for your good
work, and asking for more—having a strong sense of entitlement and
showing it—would clearly be displaying self-confidence, and would
therefore be a gender-role violation for a girl.
The social importance of abiding by gender roles was illustrated by
a recent study of adolescence and self-esteem. Researchers found that
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boys in late adolescence (between the ages of 17 and 19) who had
“agentic” or self-oriented conceptions of themselves showed significant
increases in their self-esteem when they reached young adulthood a few
years later (between the ages of 21 and 23). Similarly, girls at the same
stage of late adolescence (between 17 and 19) who held “communal”
or other-directed conceptions of themselves showed significant in-
creases in their self-esteem when they reached young adulthood.24 This
tells us that abiding by the strictures of prevailing gender roles can
have a positive impact on self-esteem, presumably because other people
respond positively to boys and girls—and men and women—who be-
have according to expectations. It also tells us that behaving in ways
inconsistent with gender roles may have negative consequences for self-esteem, because such behavior often elicits critical responses and nega-
tive feedback. The link between self-esteem and a sense of personal
entitlement is not hard to see: If you have a low sense of self-worth,
your sense of what you deserve is likely to be similarly depressed—and
you’re not likely to feel especially comfortable asking for more than
you’ve already got.
The Expectations of Adults
Because we all subconsciously adjust our behavior in response to other
people’s expectations, many researchers believe that the behavior of
adults also helps to perpetuate society’s gender-role restrictions.25 A fa-
mous and sobering study demonstrates the power of expectations. In
this study, two Harvard psychologists, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore
Jacobson, administered two tests to a group of children at an elementary