Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Linda Babcock is James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. Sara Laschever is a writer whose work has been published by the "New York Times", the "New York Review of Books", the "Village Voice", "Vogue", and other publications.

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"Women Don't Ask helps women learn how to communicate their desires. This is absolutely essential and basic information since we can't read brainwaves. Speak up or surrender your goals!"--Patricia Schroeder, President & CEO, Association of American Publishers

"Women Don't Ask does an amazing job in identifying and providing solutions to a very real issue: the challenges women face in negotiating. Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever have done a superb job not only in highlighting the problem of gender differences in negotiation but also in providing ways to begin fixing it. Example after example of the financial and emotional impacts make this issue extremely compelling. Any senior manager needs to be aware of the significant ramifications both in and out of the workplace. I highly recommend Women Don't Ask as a must read for executives--female and male."--Jim Berrien, President and Publisher, Forbes Magazine Group

"In this brilliant book Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever provide readers with the means not only of navigating the difficulties of negotiation, but also of fully engaging a modern world where traditional roles and norms are receding and business dealing has become more important. By looking at negotiation through the lens of gender, Babcock and Laschever explain why we-men and women alike--develop our skills as negotiators, and in so doing they instruct us on how to become better negotiators. By illuminating negotiation through the real-life experiences of women and men, Babcock and Laschever underscore that most important lesson in all of negotiating: that the best deal is the deal that works best for all parties."--Robert J. Shiller, author ofIrrational Exuberance and The New Financial Order

"Women don't ask the important questions that will make them successful--but Babcock and Laschever do. This is an important study of how women can become their own best advocates by knowing how to ask for exactly what they want in their public and private lives. The secret is in believing that one can negotiate almost anything. Venus and Mars, bosses and tyros: this is the book you need to bring peace and happiness to every relationship."--Harriet Rubin, author ofThe Princessa: Machiavelli for Women

"This book is an eye opener, a call to arms, and a plan for action; it is enlightening, unsettling, and, ultimately, inspiring. Although women have made great strides in American society, the reality is that, since the 1990s, progress has slowed to almost a standstill. Gracefully and with humor, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever tell a riveting story about an invisible problem that's been hiding in plain sight: one major reason that women still work for less money and advance less far and less fast than men is that women themselves have accepted the status quo and refrained from asking for more than they're offered and for less than they need or deserve. They make the novel--and important--point that negotiation may be one of feminism's final frontiers. Of all the books about the roadblocks our society erects in women's paths, this one may prove to be the most useful in everyday life."--Teresa Heinz

"Women Don't Ask is a compelling and fresh look at the gender-in-negotiation question. Practitioners can act on the advice in the book, and researchers will be asking new questions for decades. This book will fundamentally change how we think."--Max H. Bazerman, Harvard Business School

"Eye-opening and riveting."--Virginia Valian, Hunter College, City University of New York

"The authors offer advice that is practical and likely to result in desired changes for women who want to be able to accomplish more in multiple spheres of their lives."--Kathleen L. McGinn, Harvard University

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Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide

Princeton University Press

Introduction

A few years ago, when Linda was serving as the director of the Ph.D.program at her school, a delegation of women graduate students came to heroffice. Many of the male graduate students were teaching courses of theirown, the women explained, while most of the female graduate students hadbeen assigned to work as teaching assistants to regular faculty. Lindaagreed that this didn't sound fair, and that afternoon she asked theassociate dean who handled teaching assignments about the women'scomplaint. She received a simple answer: "I try to find teachingopportunities for any student who approaches me with a good idea for acourse, the ability to teach, and a reasonable offer about what it willcost," he explained. "More men ask. The women just don't ask."

The women just don't ask. This incident and the associate dean'sexplanation suggested to Linda the existence of a more pervasive problem.Could it be that women don't get more of the things they want in life inpart because they don't think to ask for them? Are there externalpressures that discourage women from asking as much as men do-and evenkeep them from realizing that they can ask? Are women really less likelythan men to ask for what they want?

To explore this question, Linda conducted a study that looked at thestarting salaries of students graduating from Carnegie Mellon Universitywith their master's degrees. When Linda looked exclusively at gender, thedifference was fairly large: The starting salaries of the men were 7.6percent or almost $4,000 higher on average than those of the women. Tryingto explain this difference, Linda looked next at who had negotiated his orher salary (who had asked for more money) and who had simply accepted theinitial offer he or she had received. It turned out that only 7 percent ofthe female students had negotiated but 57 percent (eight times as many) ofthe men had asked for more money. Linda was particularly surprised to findsuch a dramatic difference between men and women at Carnegie Mellonbecause graduating students are strongly advised by the school's CareerServices department to negotiate their job offers. Nonetheless, hardly anyof the women had done so. The most striking finding, however, was that thestudents who had negotiated (most of them men) were able to increase theirstarting salaries by 7.4 percent on average, or $4,053-almost exactly thedifference between men's and women's average starting pay. This suggeststhat the salary differences between the men and the women might have beeneliminated if the women had negotiated their offers.

Spurred on by this finding, Linda and two colleagues, Deborah Small andMichele Gelfand, designed another study to look at the propensity of menand women to ask for more than they are offered. They recruited studentsat Carnegie Mellon for an experiment and told them that they would be paidbetween three and ten dollars for playing Boggle, a game by MiltonBradley. In Boggle, players shake a cube of tile letters until all theletters fall into a grid at the bottom of the cube. They must thenidentify words that can be formed from the letters vertically,horizontally, or diagonally. Each research subject was asked to play fourrounds of the game, and then an experimenter handed him or her threedollars and said, "Here's three dollars. Is three dollars okay?" If asubject asked for more money, the experimenters would pay that participantten dollars, but they would not give anyone more money if he or she justcomplained about the compensation (an indirect method of asking). Theresults were striking-almost nine times as many male as female subjectsasked for more money. Both male and female subjects rated how well they'dplayed the game about equally, meaning that women didn't feel they shouldbe paid less or should accept less because they'd played poorly. Therewere also no gender differences in how much men and women complained aboutthe compensation (there was plenty of complaining all around). Thesignificant factor seemed to be that for men, unhappiness with what theywere offered was more likely to make them try to fix their unhappiness-byasking for more.

In a much larger study, Linda, Michele Gelfand, Deborah Small, and anothercolleague, Heidi Stayn, conducted a survey of several hundred people withaccess to the Internet (subjects were paid ten dollars to log on to awebsite and answer a series of questions). The survey asked respondentsabout the most recent negotiations they'd attempted or initiated (asopposed to negotiations they'd participated in that had been prompted orinitiated by others). For the men, the most recent negotiation they'dinitiated themselves had occurred two weeks earlier on average, while forthe women the most recent negotiation they'd initiated had occurred a fullmonth before. Averages for the second-most-recent negotiations attemptedor initiated were about seven weeks earlier for men and twenty-four weeksearlier for women.

These results suggest that men are asking for things they want andinitiating negotiations much more often than women-two to three times asoften. Linda and her colleagues wanted to be sure that this discrepancywas not produced simply by memory lapses, however, so the survey alsoasked people about the next negotiation they planned to initiate. Inkeeping with the earlier findings, the negotiations planned by the womenwere much further in the future than those being planned by the men-onemonth ahead for the women but only one week ahead for the men. This meansthat men may be initiating four times as many negotiations as women. Thesheer magnitude of this difference is dramatic, especially since respondents tothe survey included people of all ages, from a wide range of professions, andwith varied levels of education. It confirms that men really do take a moreactive approach than women to getting what they want by asking for it.

The more than 100 interviews we conducted in the process of writing thisbook-with men and women from a range of professions (including full-timemothers) and from Britain and Europe as well as the United States-supportedthese findings. When asked to identify the last negotiation in which they hadparticipated, the majority of the women we talked to named an event severalmonths in the past and described a recognized type of structured negotiation,such as buying a car. (The exceptions were women with small children, whouniformly said, "I negotiate with my kids all the time.") The majority of themen described an event that had occurred within the preceding week, andfrequently identified more informal transactions, such as negotiating with aspouse over who would take the kids to soccer practice, with a boss to pay for alarger-size rental car because of a strained back, or with a colleagueabout which parts of a joint project each team member would undertake. Menwere also more likely to mention more ambiguous situations-situationsthat could be construed as negotiations but might not be by many people.For the most part, the men we talked to saw negotiation as a bigger partof their lives and a more common event than the women did.

One particularly striking aspect of our findings was how they broke downby age. The changes brought about by the women's movement over the last 40years had led us to expect greater differences between older men and womenthan between their younger counterparts. And indeed when we discussed theideas in the book with younger women they often suggested that theproblems we were studying were "boomer" problems, afflicting older womenbut not themselves. To our surprise, however, when we looked exclusivelyat respondents to the web survey who were in their twenties and earlythirties, the gender differences in how often they initiated negotiationswere similar to or slightly larger than the differences in older cohorts(with men attempting many more negotiations than women). In addition,both the starting salary study and the Boggle study used subjects whowere in their twenties. This persuaded us that the tendency among women toaccept what they're offered and not ask for more is far from just a"boomer" problem.

The Asking Advantage

But just because women don't ask for things as often as men do, is thatnecessarily a problem? Perhaps directly negotiating for advantage-askingfor what you want-is a male strategy and women simply employ otherequally effective strategies to get what they want. This is an importantpoint, but only partly accurate. Women often worry more than men about theimpact their actions will have on their relationships. This can promptthem to change their behavior to protect personal connections, sometimesby asking for things indirectly, sometimes by asking for less than theyreally want, and sometimes simply by trying to be more deserving of whatthey want (say, by working harder) so they'll be given what they wantwithout asking. Women also frequently take a more collaborative approachto problem-solving than men take, trying to find solutions that benefitboth parties or trying to align their own requests with shared goals. Inmany situations, women's methods can be superior to those typicallyemployed by men (we explore the advantages of women's different approachesand styles in the last chapter of the book). Unfortunately, however, inour largely male-defined work culture, women's strategies can often bemisinterpreted and can leave them operating from a position of weakness.And in many cases, the only way to get something is to ask for itdirectly.

So let's look at the importance of asking.

First, consider the situation of the graduating students at CarnegieMellon, in which eight times as many men as women negotiated theirstarting salaries. The women who did not negotiate started out not justbehind their male peers, but behind where they could and should have been.With every future raise predicated on this starting point, they could bepaying for this error for a long time-perhaps for the rest of theircareers.

Liliane, now 46, is an electrical engineer and a successful softwaredesigner in New England's competitive high-tech industry. Although sheearned excellent grades in college, she was so insecure when she startedout in her field that she felt she didn't even deserve to be interviewedfor an engineering job-she was only "faking it." Despite her doubts, shequickly received an offer from a highly regarded company. When thecompany's personnel manager asked her what kind of salary she was lookingfor, she said, "I don't care what you pay me as long as you give me ajob." A big smile spread across the personnel manager's face, sheremembers. She later learned that he gave her the absolute bottom of therange for her position, which was 10 to 20 percent less than her peerswere earning. It took her ten years to fix this inequity, and she only didso, finally, by changing jobs.

Quantifying-in terms of dollars and cents-the loss to Liliane and womenlike her from not negotiating their salaries produces sobering results.Take the following example. Suppose that at age 22 an equally qualifiedman and woman receive job offers for $25,000 a year. The man negotiatesand gets his offer raised to $30,000. The woman does not negotiate andaccepts the job for $25,000. Even if each of them receives identical 3percent raises every year throughout their careers (which is unlikely,given their different propensity to negotiate and other research showingthat women's achievements tend to be undervalued), by the time they reachage 60 the gap between their salaries will have widened to more than$15,000 a year, with the man earning $92,243 and the woman only $76,870.While that may not seem like an enormous spread, remember that the manwill have been making more all along, with his extra earnings over the 38years totaling $361,171. If the man had simply banked the difference everyyear in a savings account earning 3 percent interest, by age 60 he wouldhave $568,834 more than the woman-enough to underwrite a comfortableretirement nest egg, purchase a second home, or pay for the collegeeducation of a few children. This is an enormous "return on investment"for a one-time negotiation. It can mean a higher standard of livingthroughout one's working years, financial security in old age, or atop-flight education for one's kids.

The impact of neglecting to negotiate in this one instance-when startinga new job-is so substantial and difficult to overcome that someresearchers who study the persistence of the wage gap between men andwomen speculate that much of the disparity can be traced to differences inentering salaries rather than differences in raises.

Another estimate of a woman's potential lost earnings from not negotiatingappears in the book Get Paid What You're Worth by two professors ofmanagement, Robin L. Pinkley and Gregory B. Northcraft. They estimate thata woman who routinely negotiates her salary increases will earn over onemillion dollars more by the time she retires than a woman who accepts whatshe's offered every time without asking for more. And that figure doesn'tinclude the interest on the extra amount earned. Even in such a smallmatter as the Boggle experiment, the gains to asking were great. Everyonewho asked for more money received ten dollars, more than three times asmuch as those who didn't ask and received only three dollars.

We all know that few employers will pay us any more than they need to.They're prepared to spend extra to get an applicant they want, but happyto pay less if they can. Assuming applicants will negotiate, theyroutinely offer less than they're able to pay. But if we fail to ask formore, it's a rare employer who will insist that we're not being paidenough. A recent study shows that this is true even at institutions with acommitted policy against discriminating between men and women. This studydescribes a man and a woman with equivalent credentials who were offeredassistant professorships by the same large university. Shortly after thetwo were hired, a male administrator noticed that the man's salary wassignificantly higher than the woman's. Looking into it, he learned thatboth were offered the same starting salary. The man negotiated for more,but the woman accepted what she was offered. Satisfied, the administratorlet the matter drop. He didn't try to adjust the discrepancy or alert thefemale professor to her mistake. The university was saving money andenjoying the benefits of a talented woman's hard work and expertise. Hedidn't see the long-term damage to his institution and to society from notcorrecting such inequities (which we explore later in the book), and shedidn't know how much she had sacrificed by not negotiating the offer she'dreceived.

Other new research emphasizes how important asking can be.

Continues...

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