Gender Varients in Negotiation: Do Women Negotiate Differently From Men?
Generally speaking I prefer to avoid generalizations. That is a paradox if I’ve ever heard one. Am I insane for thinking that the one true generalization is itself a generalization?
More to the point on careers that I read about this week and wanted to share with Queercents is the classic, but not unsubstantiated, generalization that men earn more than women even in positions demanding comparable levels of experience and expertise. It is the glass ceiling. This is a topic regularly discussed in some of the workshops I have conducted over the years.
The approach G. Richard Shell brings to the topic is one I haven’t heard covered to a very great extent and that I have seen explicitly avoided. In his book Bargaining For Advantage he detailed one study by Linda Babcock at Carnegie Mellon University’s business school. Her study revealed that the glass ceiling women MBA graduates faced limited their starting salaries by approximately $4,000.
Babcock’s study also suggests that this $4,000 difference may be attributable to a single differentiating factor among the study’s men and women besides gender. Men were more likely than women to ask for additional money after the employer gave notice of an initial offer. Fifty-seven percent of the men asked for more money while only seven percent of women asked for more money.
Here is the clincher. Of those who negotiated — both men and women — there was an average of just over $4,000 more in the final negotiated starting salary. Apparently Babcock summarized her findings in the book Women Don’t Ask which confirms similar results in a variety of contexts.
Shell writes “there is solid empirical evidence that women — including professionals in high-stakes business careers — chose to negotiation somewhat less often than do men in such important areas as salary and promotion. In negotiation style terms, women behave, on average, a bit more cooperatively than men.”
I find myself wondering if anyone has taken the time to look for measurable differences in the typical negotiation styles of lgbt folks versus heterosexual folks. Alas, my case law book is bidding for me to pick it up and read some more about the “reasonable man.” I’ll leave it to any interested Queercents readers and the availability of the comments section for further discussion and enlightenment.
Based entirely on my own limited experience, the idea that women negotiate less is probably true. I’m not sure whether it would have ever occurred to me to negotiate a starting salary if I hadn’t found out that my male colleagues do it routinely.
The only issue I now have with this kind of negotiating is the anecdotal evidence that it doesn’t look good for women to negotiate for cash. They are seen as too aggressive and so on.
Yes, you make an important point I think. It moves us towards answering the next logical question: Why women are less likely to negotiate for a starting salary?
The perception of a woman making a counter offer is that she is pushy or aggressive like you say. For men to make the same counter offer the perception is that he is a savvy business person and competitive in a good way.
Earlier this month, Ramit Sethi at IWillTeachYouToBeRich posted an article called: 13 stunning differences in how men and women think about money.
The 53 comments posted there are the most interesting part of the conversation. Worth a look.