Do Women Ask?

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/irel.12214
• Author: Amanda H. Goodall,Andrew J. Oswald,Benjamin Artz
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Date: 01 October 2018

Do Women Ask?*

BENJAMIN ARTZ , AMANDA H. GOODALL and ANDREW J.

OSWALD

Females typically earn less than males. The reasons are not fully understood. This

paper re-examines the idea that women “don’t ask,”which potentially assigns part

of the responsibility for the gender pay gap onto female behavior. Such an

account cannot readily be tested with standard datasets. This paper is the first to

be able to use matched employer–employee data in which workers are questioned

about their asking behavior. It concludes that males and females ask equally often

for promotions and raises. The paper’s empirical results suggest, however, that

while women do now ask they “don’t get.”

Introduction

This paper explores one of the famous puzzles of the modern workplace.

Across the industrialized world, female workers typically earn less than their

male counterparts. It is not completely understood why this pattern—one con-

sistent with the existence of gender discrimination—persists.

1

The paper is

able to draw upon an unusual form of survey evidence. Using new data, it

revisits two ideas that have been put forward, in different forms, in writings in

the industrial relations, psychology, social science, and labor economics litera-

tures. They can be expressed in a simplified form as:

Idea 1. In certain circumstances, women may have a lower propensity

than men to ask for pay raises and promotions;

Idea 2. Women may be reluctant to “ask,”because that might be viewed

by their manager as pushy or “out-of-role”behavior for a female.

JEL: J31, J71.

*The authors’affiliations are, respectively, University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh, Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

E-mail: artzb@uwosh.edu; Cass Business School, City, University of London, London, UK. E-mail:

amanda.goodall.1@city.ac.uk; and University of Warwick, CAGE Research Centre and IZA; E-mail:

a.j.oswald@warwick.ac.uk. For many helpful suggestions, the authors thank the editor and two referees, and

Linda Babcock, Paul Bain, Pat McGovern, and Paul Oyer.

1

For statements of the latest evidence, see Azmat and Petrongolo (2014) and Blau and Kahn (2017).

Srivastava and Sherman (2015) found that having a female manager does little to close the gender gap. New

evidence from Auspurg, Hinz, and Sauer (2017) points to the role of perceptions of “fairness.”

INDUSTRIAL RELATIONS, DOI: 10.1111/irel.12214, Vol. 57, No. 4 (October 2018).

©2018 Regent s of the Univers ity of Calif ornia Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc., 350 Main Street,

Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK.

611

It seems important to try to assess these arguments. First, they assign part

of the responsibility for gender differentials onto females and their own

actions. Second, our approach allows us to probe whether there might have

been a change in women’s propensity to ask for a pay raise, since what is

widely recognized as the seminal work of Babcock and Laschever (2003) in

the monograph entitled Women Don’t Ask.

These issues are important and current. In the recent words of Blau and

Kahn (2017: 843):

Women’s lower propensity to negotiate over salaries, raises, or promo-

tions, could reduce their pay relative to men’s. The observed gender

difference could reflect social factors, including women being social-

ized to feel that they are being pushy or overbearing...

In this paper we estimate econometric “asking”equations. We use labor-

market data for the period 2013–2014. In most survey datasets used by labor

economists, it is intrinsically hard to assess Ideas 1 and 2. The reason is that

the information gathered in conventional surveys is on people’s actual earnings

(rather than on whether workers are “asking”) and on other objective aspects

of workplaces (rather than on underlying psychological reasons and attitudes).

This is probably why little formal testing of these ideas has been done on real-

world field data.

There is substantial published evidence about the factors that help to explain

variations in negotiating behavior between men and women. Three areas have

attracted special attention: (1) the nature of the task being negotiated and the

situation in which negotiation takes place; (2) whether negotiation over pay

has been established as an explicit norm in the workplace or is ambiguous;

and (3) personal facets, such as potentially lower confidence among women,

and the identity costs of behaving “out of role,”because negotiating over eco-

nomic factors can be viewed as an intrinsically male form of behavior (Heil-

man 2001; Heilman and Okimoto 2007; Inzlicht 2011; Kray and Gelfand

2009; Leibbrandt and List 2015; Mazei et al. 2015; Niederle and Vesterlund

2007; Sandberg 2013). Early, and pioneering, work in this area was done by

the psychologist Alice Eagly, as in Eagly (1987) and Eagly and Karau (2002).

A number of previous studies are particularly relevant. In an experimental

setting, Bear and Babcock (2012) found no difference in gender negotiating

performance when the product being negotiated is viewed as more “female”

(e.g., glass beads). However, when the product is perceived as more “mascu-

line”(e.g., car headlights), men outnegotiate women. Although there is some

evidence that men on average do better in economic negotiating situations,

there is considerable empirical support for the fact that the context and the nat-

ure of the task can have a mediating influence (Mazei et al. 2015).

612 / BENJAMIN ARTZ,AMANDA H. GOODALL,AND ANDREW J. OSWALD