Women have negotiated less effectively for salaries than men in a number of studies. The real-life consequences of this trend is a persistently lower salaries than men throughout women’s working lives.
Linda Babcock
The lifetime salary gap for women MBAs was estimated at USD $500,000 – USD $2 million when compared with male classmates, according to Carnegie Mellon’s Linda Babcock.
She linked this difference to men’s greater willingness to negotiate salary and promotions.
Catherine DesRoches
This salary difference also exists for women in academic medicine, who earned about 80 percent of their male peers’ compensation in a salary study by Harvard’s Catherine DesRoches, Sowmya Rao, Lisa Iezzoni, and Eric Campbell with Darren Zinner of Brandeis.
Babcock, with Sara Laschever, suggested that these negotiation differences are linked to gender socialization practices.
Sara Laschever
They observed that many parents encourage boys to take risks, earn money, and participate in competitive team sports.
These activities can prepare people to negotiate, compete, and tolerate disrupted interpersonal relationships.
In contrast, they suggested that parents may encourage girls to play collaboratively and value interpersonal affiliation instead of getting part-time jobs and participating in sports teams.
John List
Women’s avoidance of salary negotiation and preferring less competitive work roles, was also reported by University of Chicago’s John List, Andreas Leibbrandt, and Jeffrey Flory.
This team’s research studied respondents to two identical “job ads” on internet job boards with different wage structures.
One position offered hourly pay whereas the other role’s pay depended on performance compared with coworkers.
More women than men applied to the hourly wage role.
Andreas Leibbrandt
Men were 94 percent more likely than women to seek and perform well in competitive work roles among nearly 7,000 job seekers across 16 large American cities.
This gender wage gap “more than doubled” as performance-linked compensation increased.
Women in these studies were significantly more likely to choose less competitive employment options.
Jeffrey Flory
Women were also more likely to apply to jobs in which the performance required teamwork rather than individual accomplishment.
Likewise, women favoured flat fee compensation that was unrelated to performance.
Men did not wait for an invitation or permission to negotiate.
They were more likely to negotiate even when there was no explicit statement that wages were negotiable.
When there was a specific invitation to ask for higher salaries and job titles, women negotiated as frequently as men
Babcock and Laschever noted that negotiation practices considered “acceptable” for men may be unfavourably viewed when women use them.
They advised women to adopt several changes in negotiation mindset and behaviours:
- Consider that “everything is negotiable,”
- Research personal “market worth” using online resources like Salary.com, Payscale.com, and Glassdoor.com,
- Consider oneself worthy of higher salaries and job roles,
- Examine self-limiting beliefs about negotiation,
- Plan negotiation talking points, including accomplishments, results, impact,
- Practice negotiating the salary proposal, suggest timing, set an ambitious anchor point, prepare for objections,
- Plan counter-offers and practice self-regulation (such as through intentional breathing) to maintain negotiation position and interpersonal rapport.
Harvard’s Roger Fisher and William Ury added recommendations for Collaborative Negotiation that enables both people to derive value from the negotiation conversation through preparation, proactivity, and persistence while reaffirming the negotiation goal’s value for all parties.
Ohio State’s Roy Lewicki, David Saunders of Queen’s University, and Vanderbilt’s Bruce Barry of Vanderbilt contributed additional research-based guidance on effective Negotiation.
Leigh Thompson
Related research by Leigh Thompson of Northwestern, found that more than 90% of negotiators neglect to ask “diagnostic questions” that reveal the negotiation partner’s most important needs, priorities, preferences, and even fears.
When negotiators elicited these “wants,” they achieved significantly improved negotiation outcomes.
Pat Heim
Women’s reluctance to negotiate may be related to gender differences in attributions of success and failure, suggested Pat Heim
Women often attribute failures to themselves (“internalizing”) whereas men identify external factors (“rationalisations”l, “excuses”) associated with their shortcomings.
Women are more likely to attribute success to external factors (“deflection of merit”), whereas men typically attribute their effective performance to themselves (“self-bolstering”).
Men are often promoted because they are seen to have “potential,” but women are more likely to be promoted based on their results and accomplishments, noted Heim.
Even factors like attire can influence perception of authority: Men judged women as less authoritative when wearing “business casual” attire.
These studies encourage women to develop skills and behaviours required to close the wage gap between professional women and men.
-How do you prepare for negotiations and overcome objections during negotiations?
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©Kathryn Welds
Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary 