Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide.

• Author: Solnick, Sara
• Position: Book Review

Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide By Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 223. $24.99

How do women sell themselves short? In Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever count the ways. Women fail to perceive the opportunity to negotiate, they feel no need to improve their position, they feel undeserving of greater rewards, social norms and anxiety prevent them from initiating negotiations and making demands, they lack information to set appropriate goals, they tend to set lower goals, they capitulate sooner, and opposing parties tend to negotiate harder against them. These tendencies are found in women in their twenties as well as older cohorts. Babcock and Laschever carefully address each link in the chain of women's weaker performance at the negotiating table, reviewing the appropriate literature and presenting the results of new research they conducted to address their questions.

Economists in particular should pay heed. Donna Ginther and Shulamit Kahn (2004) have investigated tenure outcomes for women in economics. The gender gap in the tenure rate 10 years after the Ph.D. is more than 20 percentage points, compared to 8 in social science and less than 3 in physical science, statistics, life science, engineering, and political science. Fully three-quarters of the gap is not explained by differences in endowments. Ginther and Kahn show that women publish fewer papers than men (although the tenure gap remains when controlling for publications) and hypothesize that women may enjoy fewer research-enhancing resources such as research assistance and course reductions. So much is up for grabs in the ivory tower, and it is easy to imagine that women are not getting their fair share, to their professional detriment.

Women Don't Ask has the potential to be a very depressing book. The authors have collected numerous distressing stories from women who didn't ask. For example, several women confess that they were so grateful to receive a job offer that they allowed the employer to name their salary, later learning that others were being paid much more. Researchers have estimated that an employee who negotiates every salary increase will earn a million dollars more over the course of a career compared to one who does not. Asking is necessary outside the workplace as well. One story, about a woman who didn't marry the father of her child,

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