by Adam Grant
But the gender gap, it turns out, wasn’t quite due to a glass ceiling. Men and women received similar starting offers, and the discrepancy emerged by the time they signed their final offers. Upon closer inspection, Babcock discovered a dramatic difference between men and women in the willingness to ask for more money. More than half of the men—57 percent—tried to negotiate their starting salaries, compared with only 7 percent of the women. The men were more than eight times as likely to negotiate as the women. The students who did negotiate (mostly men) improved their salaries by an average of 7.4 percent, enough to account for the gender gap.
The discrepancy in willingness to negotiate wasn’t limited to the quantitative world of Carnegie Mellon MBAs. In another study, Babcock and her colleagues recruited people to play four rounds of Boggle for a fee of somewhere between $3 and $10. When they finished, the researcher acted like a taker, handing them the minimum of $3 and asking, “Is three dollars okay?” Once again, eight times as many men as women asked for more money. The next study went the same way, but the researcher handed them the minimum of $3 without asking if it was okay. None of the women asked for more money, whereas 13 percent of the men took the initiative to ask for more. With another group of participants, the researcher handed over $3 and said, “The exact payment is negotiable.” The majority of the men (59 percent) seized the opportunity and asked for more, compared with only 17 percent of the women. Overall, the men were 8.3 times more likely to ask for more money than the women. In each case, the women were doormats, allowing takers to walk all over them. Research shows that one of the main reasons that women tend to negotiate less assertively than men is that they worry about violating social expectations that they’ll be warm and kind.*
Yet women aren’t the only ones who become pushovers at the bargaining table. The doormat effect is a curse that afflicts givers of both genders. In several experiments, male and female givers were willing to make large concessions just to reach an agreement that would make their counterparts happy, even if they had better options available. And in a series of studies led by Notre Dame professor Timothy Judge, nearly four thousand Americans filled out a survey on whether they were givers, indicating the degree to which they tended to be helpful, caring, and trusting. On average, the givers earned 14 percent lower income than their less giving counterparts, taking an annual pay hit of nearly $7,000. When the data were split by gender, the income penalty was three times greater for giver men than giver women. The female givers earned an average of 5.47 percent less money than their peers, for a difference of $1,828. The male givers earned an average of 18.31 percent less money than their peers, for a difference of $9,772.*
As we saw earlier in the chapter on powerless communication, givers tend to be humble and uncomfortable asserting themselves directly. Studies in more controlled settings have shown that in zero-sum situations, givers frequently shy away from advocating for their own interests: when negotiating their salaries, they make more modest requests than matchers and takers, and end up accepting less favorable outcomes. This reluctance to be assertive is especially likely to afflict agreeable givers, who pay a price in their pocketbooks.*
At a professional services firm, a man who I’ll call Sameer Jain was a giver who consistently fell victim to the doormat effect. Sameer was ranked at the top of his class and the top 10 percent of all employees in the northeast United States at his firm, and dedicated much of his time to helping colleagues and mentoring junior employees. Despite being a star performer, he watched his friends at other firms get promoted faster and earn more income, and he never negotiated his salary or asked for a raise. On several occasions, he watched assertive peers who were no better performers negotiate raises and promotions, sailing past him in the corporate hierarchy. “I did not push hard enough to make that happen for myself. I didn’t want to make others uncomfortable or overstep my bounds.”
Growing up in India, Sameer was a pushover, which made him the butt of jokes in his family. His father came from a background in poverty, and learned to be a hard-nosed negotiator who bargained for everything, clawing his family up to the middle class. Sameer grew up shielded, protected from having to assert himself. His submissiveness bothered his wife, who was a tough negotiator. When they first started dating, Sameer was about to sign a lease on an apartment. His wife intervened, negotiated on his behalf, and reduced the rent by $600 a year. He was impressed, but also embarrassed. Since then, whenever they make a purchase, he has turned to his wife to negotiate, knowing that he would be a doormat. “To be honest, I’ve been ashamed of this for a long time,” he admits.
After he left the professional services firm, Sameer completed an MBA and received a job offer from a Fortune 500 medical technology company, his ideal employer. He wasn’t entirely satisfied with the terms of the offer, but as usual, he was reluctant to negotiate. “I felt awkward. I like my boss, and I didn’t want to make him uncomfortable.” Weakening Sameer’s position further, the economy had just crashed, and his peers were all signing without negotiating.
But something was different this time. By a couple months later, Sameer had negotiated increases in his total compensation to the tune of more than $70,000. He had undergone a chump change, transforming from his traditional doormat status into a more assertive, more successful negotiator. “My wife was stunned, and she complimented my persistence and effectiveness as a negotiator,” he says. “For her to see me as a good negotiator is the ultimate validation.” What was it that drove Sameer to step up to the plate?
The answer can be found in an ingenious experiment conducted by Linda Babcock and her colleagues. The participants were 176 senior executives from private and public organizations, with titles ranging from CEO and COO to president, general manager, and chairman. The executives all started with the same information: an employee in a software company was being promoted, and they were negotiating compensation for the new position. The male executives playing the role of the employee landed an average of $146,000, 3 percent higher than the women’s average of $141,000. But with a single sentence, Babcock and colleagues helped the female executives boost their averages to $167,000, outdoing the men by 14 percent.
All it took was to tell them they were playing a different role. Instead of imagining that they were the employee, the female executives were asked to imagine that they were the employee’s mentor. Now the women were agents advocating for someone else. Interestingly, they didn’t set higher goals, but they were willing to push harder to achieve their goals, which led them to better outcomes. In a similar study, researchers Emily Amanatullah and Michael Morris asked men and women to negotiate the terms of an attractive job offer. Half were instructed to imagine that they had received the offer themselves and negotiate accordingly. The other half were instructed to imagine that they had referred a friend for the job and were now responsible for negotiating on behalf of the friend. Once again, all of the participants set similar goals, irrespective of whether they were male or female, or negotiating for themselves or a friend.
But their actual behavior in the negotiations varied strikingly. Regardless of whether they were negotiating for themselves or others, the men requested starting salaries averaging $49,000. The women followed a different path. When they were negotiating for themselves, they requested starting salaries averaging only $42,000—16.7 percent lower than the men.
This discrepancy vanished when the women negotiated on behalf of a friend. As advocates, women did just as well as the men, requesting an average of $49,000. In another study, Amanatullah and Morris found the same results with experienced executives negotiating: male executives landed the same salaries regardless of whether they were negotiating for themselves or others, whereas female executives did much better when negotiating for others than themselves. And Vanderbilt professors Bruce Barry and Ray Friedman found that in short-term, single-issue negotiations, givers do worse than takers, because they’re willing to give larger slices of
the pie to their counterparts. But this disadvantage disappears entirely when the givers set high goals and stick to them—which is easier for givers to do when advocating for someone else.
Advocating for others was the key to Sameer’s chump change. When he shied away from negotiating with his initial employer, Sameer was thinking about his own interests. With the Fortune 500 medical technology company, he put himself in a different frame of mind: he was representing his family’s interests. Although he might be a doormat when he was responsible for himself, being a giver meant that he didn’t want to let other people down. “I used it as a psychological weapon against myself, to motivate myself,” Sameer says. “The solution was thinking about myself as an agent, an advocate for my family. As a giver, I feel guilty about pushing too much, but the minute I start thinking, ‘I’m hurting my family, who’s depending on me for this,’ I don’t feel guilty about pushing for that side.”
By thinking of himself as an agent representing his family, Sameer summoned the resolve to make an initial request for a higher salary and tuition reimbursement. This was an otherish strategy. On the one hand, he was doing what givers do naturally: advocating for other people’s interests. On the other hand, he intentionally advocated for his family, whose interests were closely aligned with his own. At the same time, he wasn’t pushing so far as to become a taker: he sought a balance in meeting his family’s interests and his company’s. “My value system means that I’m not going to do anything that’s wrong or unfair,” Sameer explains. “I’m not going to try to gouge anyone, but I am going to push to the point that’s right and fair.”
When Sameer first contacted his new boss to negotiate, he asked for a salary increase and reimbursement of his MBA tuition. This matched what other firms were offering, but the boss came back with disappointing news from HR: they weren’t able to grant either request. At that point, Sameer felt the urge to back down. He wanted to be a giver toward his boss, and he was worried that getting more money would harm his boss’s performance or compromise his budget. But Sameer had massive debt from student loans, and he felt responsible for his family first. He asked again, convincing his boss to lobby HR for the bump in his salary and signing bonus. He ended up getting a $5,000 salary increase and a $5,000 signing bonus increase. By that time, his $10,000 signing bonus had expired. Sameer asked for that too, and got it. His boss assured him that this was the best he could do.
Sameer was already up $20,000 in the first year alone, not to mention the dividends that the base salary increase would accrue, but he wasn’t done yet. He still wasn’t receiving tuition reimbursement, so he was determined to find another way to support his family. He had plenty of free time during his last semester of school, so he negotiated a consulting arrangement to work for the company part-time. The company agreed to pay him $135 per hour, which would net Sameer another $50,000 in the span of a few months. At that point, he signed the contract, having upped his total compensation by more than $70,000. “Being able to keep pushing, a large part of that was being an agent,” Sameer says. “If I don’t push now, what’s going to happen when I get another promotion? I’m going to be that guy who has three kids and gets pushed around. Thinking of myself as an agent motivated me to keep going. It gave me some extra cojones.”
Although advocating for his family helped him succeed, Sameer was still concerned about how it would affect his reputation at the firm and his relationship with his boss. When the negotiation was finished, his boss shared a surprising sentiment: he admired Sameer’s assertiveness. “It was part of why my boss wanted me,” Sameer says. “He respected that I wasn’t going to be pushed around anymore.” Givers, particularly agreeable ones, often overestimate the degree to which assertiveness might be off-putting to others. But Sameer didn’t just earn respect by virtue of negotiating; his boss was impressed with how he negotiated. When HR initially rejected Sameer’s request, he explained his family’s circumstances. “I don’t just have to worry about paying rent now. I have a family to support and loans to repay. Can you make this more palatable for me?” By asking on behalf of his family, instead of himself, Sameer was maintaining an image as a giver. He showed that he was willing to advocate for others, which sent a positive signal about how hard he would work when representing the company’s interests.
Babcock and colleagues call this a relational account—an explanation for a request that highlights concern for the interests of others, not only oneself. When women ask for a higher salary, they run the risk of violating expectations that they will be “other-oriented and caring, giving rather than taking in character,” Babcock writes with Hannah Riley Bowles. Whereas women may be uniquely worried that assertiveness will violate gender norms, givers of both sexes worry about violating their own reciprocity preferences. If they push too hard, they’ll feel like takers, rather than givers. But when givers are advocating for someone else, pushing is closely aligned with their values of protecting and promoting the interests of others: givers can chalk it up to caring. And by offering relational accounts, givers do more than just think of themselves as agents advocating for others; they present themselves as agents advocating for others, which is a powerful way to maintain their self-images and social images as givers.
This reasoning proved relevant to Lillian Bauer when she decided to stop letting clients treat her like a doormat. “I want to be generous, and I build trust with clients, but that doesn’t mean they can walk all over me,” Bauer notes. To decline requests from clients that fell outside the scope of a project, she used a combination of advocacy and relational accounts. Starting with advocacy, Bauer began to think about herself as an agent for the consultants on her team. “Givers have a protective side. In negotiating with a client, I feel a lot of responsibility for my team, and it makes me more willing to draw a hard line.” Then, she developed a habit of articulating this responsibility to her clients: “When a client makes an unreasonable request, I explain that it’s going to stretch my team, or kill them working crazy hours. The client knows I will bend over backward to do what’s right for them, so when I do push back, it has a lot more impact: there’s a good reason for it.”
Pushing Past Pushover
Lillian’s progress struck a chord with me. As a freshman in college, I accepted a job selling advertisements for the Let’s Go travel guides. Written and produced entirely by Harvard students, the Let’s Go guides were billed as the bible of the budget traveler, rivaling Lonely Planet, Frommer’s, and Rick Steves’ as the go-to resource for getting around a foreign country on the cheap. On my first day, my manager handed me a list of clients and said, “These people spent about $300,000 last year on ads in the Let’s Go books. Just call them up and convince them to advertise again.” Then she turned around and walked away.
As I realized that I wouldn’t get any training, I began to panic. I had no product knowledge and no relevant experience, and I had never left North America. I was only eighteen years old, and I had no business making sales pitches to senior vice presidents at major international companies.*
I mustered up the courage to call one of Let’s Go’s longtime advertisers, a man named Steven who ran a travel agency. The moment he started talking, it was clear he was furious. “At first, I was glad to see that my agency was written up in the books, separate from my ad,” he snarled, “until I saw that outdated contact information was listed. So your readers can reach me, I’ve had to pay hundreds of dollars to maintain old postal addresses and e-mail accounts.” I gently explained that advertising and editorial are separate departments; I could ensure the accuracy of his ads, but I had no influence over the content of the books themselves. Steven didn’t care; he demanded an advertising discount to make up for the editorial error and threatened not to renew his ad if I didn’t comply. Feeling bad for him, I granted him a 10 percent discount. This violated a Let’s Go policy that appeared in my contract, prohibiting all discounts that didn’t appear in our media kit, and it was a pre
view of more mistakes to come.
After contacting several dozen clients, I had given three more discounts and signed very few contracts, which became mortifying when I learned that Let’s Go had a 95 percent client renewal rate. Along with bringing in no revenue, when a client demanded a refund on the previous year’s ad, I caved, becoming the first employee to give away money that was already on the books. In empathizing with clients and trying to meet their needs in any way possible, I was helping them at my own expense—not to mention my company’s. I was a disaster, and I was ready to quit.
It wasn’t the first time I had been a giver to a fault. When I was fourteen, I decided to become a springboard diver. I was determined to master the art of hurling myself into the air, doing somersaults and twists, and entering the water gracefully without a splash. Never mind that I could hardly jump, flip, or twist, I was terrified to try new dives, and my teammates called out my lack of flexibility by nicknaming me Frankenstein. One day, my coach brought a metronome to practice in the hopes of improving my timing. After several hours of effort, he declared me incapable of rhythm.
For the next four years, I trained six hours a day. Eventually, I became a two-time state finalist, a two-time junior Olympic national qualifier, and an All-American diver. I would go on to compete at the NCAA varsity level at Harvard. But along the way, I sacrificed my own success. Several months before the biggest meet of my life, I volunteered to coach two of my competitors. I taught them new dives, critiqued their form, and revealed the secret of the rip entry, showing them how to disappear into the water at the end of a dive.
They returned the favor by beating me at the state championships, by just a handful of points.
At Let’s Go, I was once again benefiting others at a personal cost. Although I was helping my clients save money, I was a pushover, losing revenues for the company and sacrificing my own commission. But the following week, I happened to meet a new assistant manager at Let’s Go whose position was created as a result of the advertising revenue that my predecessor generated. The job made it possible for her to pay for school. It was the inspiration that I needed: I realized that my colleagues were depending on me. As a student, I didn’t have a wife and children yet, but I could see myself as an agent on behalf of college students in search of jobs that would defray the cost of tuition and provide meaningful work experiences. I might be a doormat when lobbying solely for my own interests, but when I was representing the interests of students, I was willing to fight to protect them.