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

• Author: Craver, Charles B.
• 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. xii, 223. $24.95.

Last spring, Jennifer and Richard graduated from the same law school with similar backgrounds. Both were offered associate positions with the same law firm with a $75,000 starting salary. Jennifer enthusiastically accepted the firm's offer, but Richard was hesitant. He informed the hiring partner that comparable firms in this area were paying new associates $80,000 per year. The partner offered Richard a starting salary of $80,000, which he accepted.

Felicia and Harold manage similar departments for an e-commerce business. They have similar backgrounds, and have been with this firm for the same number of years. When Harold meets with the CEO to review his recent performance, the CEO gives him a "superior" rating, and offers him a $10,000 salary increase. Harold notes that his departmental sales went up 10% over the past twelve months and indicates that he thinks he should receive a more substantial increase. The CEO praises Harold for his initiative and confidence, and agrees to a $20,000 increase. Two days later, Felicia meets with the CEO to review her performance. The CEO gives her a "superior" rating, and offers her a $10,000 salary increase. Felicia notes that her departmental sales have increased 20% over the past year and requests a more generous increase. The CEO indicates that he has always found her a bit pushy and self-centered. He encourages her to develop her "feminine side" and be "more lady-like." He then says that if she wants an increase of more than $10,000, she should look for work elsewhere.

INTRODUCTION

For many years, the annual earnings of women working full-time have lagged behind the earnings of men working full-time. (1) Until the last two decades, women earned about 60% of what their male cohorts earned. Although this gender gap has narrowed in recent years to approximately 80% (2) as many women have entered traditionally male occupations, the wage gap remains significant. Some of this differential is caused by the continued concentration of women in traditionally female occupations, and the fact that women are more likely than men to take time out from paid work to take care of parental obligations. (3) But much of this difference is due to the reluctance of women to believe that they deserve more, and the hesitancy of females to use their bargaining skills to obtain greater salary increases. It may also reflect the concern of women that they will be evaluated negatively if they contradict stereotyped supervisory expectations and behave too much like their male colleagues.

In their new book, Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide ("Women Don't Ask"), Linda Babcock (4) and Sara Laschever (5) thoughtfully explore relevant gender-based stereotypes and the reluctance of women to negotiate more advantageous employment terms for themselves. The detailed empirical research discussed by Babcock and Laschever explains why females feel less comfortable in bargaining contexts than their male cohorts. The authors also discuss ways in which women can overcome these gender-based inhibitions.

To the extent women undervalue their services and are hesitant to negotiate more generous employment conditions, they may place themselves at a disadvantage vis-a-vis male colleagues who perform substantially equal work. When employers permit these gender-based compensation differentials to exist, they expose themselves to liability under the Equal Pay Act. (6) Unless employers can establish that the differentials are based upon one of the four statutory exceptions, (7) they may be held liable for back pay, an equal amount of liquidated damages, and attorney fees. (8)

Gender-based stereotypes may also expose employers to potential liability under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. (9) If firms are aware of the reluctance of women to negotiate higher salaries for themselves and deliberately choose to pay male employees more for work of comparable worth, they may contravene Title VIFs sex discrimination prohibition. In addition, subconscious sex-related behavioral role expectations that cause similarly situated men and women to be judged differently may create other Title VII problems.

In Part I, this Review will explore the empirical studies discussed in Woman Don't Ask and evaluate the impact of those research findings on male and female bargaining encounters. Part II will then examine Equal Pay Act issues that may arise because of the hesitancy of women to seek compensation levels commensurate with those of their male cohorts. Finally, Part III will discuss ways in which different gender-based stereotypes may raise substantial Title VII issues with respect to women whose behavior contradicts societal expectations.

1. GENDER AND BARGAINING INTERACTIONS

   When Linda Babcock was director of her Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University, she discovered that the starting salaries of male graduates were 7.6% higher than those for female graduates (p.1). She endeavored to determine the reason for this differential and found that while 57% of men asked for more money when they received job offers, only 7% of women did so (p. 1). The graduates who negotiated their starting salaries increased their initial offers by 7.4% (p. 2). She noted that most employers actually expect new hires to bargain over their initial employment terms and could not understand why more women were not willing to do so (p. 8). While young boys are taught to ask for what they want, young girls are taught to focus more on the needs of others (p. 11). Men are expected to be bold and even aggressive when advancing their own interests, while women are supposed to behave modestly and unselfishly (p. 11). She also noted that even when females do negotiate their initial terms of employment, they tend to obtain less beneficial salaries than males, because women generally ask for less and have lower personal expectations (pp. 11-12).

   Babcock wanted to learn more about the reluctance of women to negotiate and the hesitancy of females who do ask for more to seek as much as their male colleagues. She initially used a "turnip-to-oyster" scale which measured the propensity of people to think they can change their own circumstances. She and her colleagues found that females are 45% more likely than males to achieve low scores on this scale, indicating that they do not believe they can modify their personal situations (pp. 19-20). She then employed a "locus-of-control" scale designed to determine whether test takers think they exercise meaningful control over their own circumstances, and discovered that males are far more likely to believe they can control their own destinies than women. (10)

   Studies pertaining to the acculturation process for boys and girls help to explain many of the gender-based differences Babcock found. Boys are brought up to believe they can control their own lives, while girls are taught they exercise less control over their personal situations (p. 29). When parents assign chores to young sons and daughters, they tend to assign more independent tasks to boys than to girls (p. 29). Parents generally feel that girls are more vulnerable than boys, and they are more protective of their daughters than their sons (p. 30). Girls tend to play more structured games that teach them compliant behavior, while boys tend to play less-structured games that encourage more-independent behavior (pp. 34-35).

   In Chapter 2, Babcock and Laschever explore empirical studies indicating that females tend to expect lower salaries than their male cohorts (pp. 41-61). As children, girls are usually asked to perform housekeeping chores (cleaning, cooking, and dishwashing) for which they receive no monetary rewards, while boys tend to perform external tasks (lawn mowing and car washing) for which they receive cash payments (p. 47). As a result, when males and females enter the regular labor force, males expect greater compensation than do females who tend to compare their salaries only with those earned by other women rather than to the higher salaries received by men (pp. 54-55).

   Societal expectations for males and females differ greatly. "Men are thought to be assertive, dominant, decisive, ambitious, and self-oriented, whereas women are thought to be warm, expressive, nurturing, emotional, and friendly" (p.62). Due to their other oriented upbringings, females find it more difficult to ask for things for themselves than their self-oriented male cohorts (p. 63). Babcock and Laschever cite "pay-allocation" studies indicating that females expect less pay for the same work, and expect to work for longer periods for the same compensation, than do males (p. 64).

   Men and women continue to be employed in traditionally male and female occupations. The vast majority of child-care workers, elementary-school teachers, nurses, secretaries, and social workers are women, while the vast majority of corporate officers, engineers, construction workers, and financial managers are men (p. 65). Much of this gender-based occupational segregation is attributable to the acculturation process. Most of the characters on Saturday morning children's television programs are male, and the majority of action figures in computer games are male (p. 70). Boys play with action toys, and girls play with dolls and kitchen equipment designed to inculcate care-giving skills (p. 70). Despite societal changes over the past several decades, recent studies of undergraduate students have found that men and women continue to have strong gender-based role expectations (p. 75).

   Boys are raised to have a sense of entitlement--they deserve what they earn--while girls are implicitly taught that they do not deserve very much (pp. 51-54). As a result, girls develop the "imposter syndrome" which causes them to question...