Supreme Court wrote:
In the specific context of sex stereotyping, an employer who acts on
the basis of a belief that a woman cannot be aggressive, or that she
must not be, has acted on the basis of gender. . . . We are beyond the
day when an employer could evaluate employees by assuming or
insisting that they matched the stereotype associated with their
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group. . . . An employer who objects to aggressiveness in women but
whose positions require this trait places women in an intolerable
Catch 22: out of a job if they behave aggressively and out of a job if
they don’t. Title VII lifts women out of this bind.89
In other words, it is now illegal for “women who do not have a ‘soft,
genteel way’ about them” to be told “that they should wear more make-
up and go to charm school.” (This is what Ann Hopkins’s supervisors
said when they rejected her bid for a partnership.)90
Although Hopkins had the self-confidence to fight for what she had
earned, and changed the law in the process, many women prefer to
avoid this kind of struggle and instead back away from asking for what
they’ve rightly earned. The very real risks involved in displaying their
competence, trying to ensure that their work is fairly evaluated, and
promoting their own ambitions can cause many women so much anxi-
ety that they choose instead to avoid negotiation altogether. We look at
the sometimes crippling impact of anxiety on women’s reluctance to
ask for what they want in the next chapter.
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5
Fear of Asking
Catherine, a 43-year-old lawyer from Kansas City, had worked in
the public sector for most of her career. She never made much
money and after almost two decades of public service she decided to
switch to the private sector. Although she anticipated a large boost in
her earnings, she took the precaution of consulting Linda—a friend
from college—before embarking on her search. With Linda’s help, she
researched what comparable people in comparable jobs were making,
identified the salary she should be able to get, and practiced negotiation
tactics. She soon found a job she liked, but the offer she received was
significantly lower than she’d hoped. Nonetheless, despite all her prepa-
ration, Catherine accepted the offer without negotiating. At the critical
moment, she said, she “panicked and caved.” The prospect of negotiat-
ing made her too nervous to go through with her plan.
Gabriela, 50, serves as the general manager of a leading symphony
orchestra. This extraordinarily capable woman routinely negotiates with
unions, foundations, record companies, and concert halls on behalf of
her company. Despite her reputation as a tough and skillful bargainer,
though, she cannot bring herself to ask her own board of directors for
what she thinks is a fair raise. Every year at the time of her review, she
gives the directors a list of salaries earned by individuals in comparable
jobs—and every year she accepts whatever they offer her without asking
for more. She says, “I’m annoyed that this last time I did it again. . . . I
just said thank you. I’m annoyed because I think they’d respect me
more if I said something back. They’re probably wondering—how good
can she be at negotiating for [the orchestra] if she can’t even negotiate
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for herself?” Even though the benefits of asking are obvious to Gabriela
(not just more money but greater respect from her board), her anxiety
makes it impossible for her to do so.
What’s going on here? Catherine had practiced and prepared to ne-
gotiate, but at the last moment she couldn’t bring herself to try. Gabriela
knows that asking for a raise would probably produce a totally positive
outcome—both more money and more respect—but still she doesn’t do
it. Why not? Little research to date answers this question, presumably
because until now scholars have assumed that people of both sexes
approach negotiation using simple economic reasoning: After calculat-
ing costs and benefits, they decide to negotiate when the benefits prom-
ise to exceed the costs. But how does this explain the large number of
women who say they never negotiate at all? How can the simple eco-
nomics of their lives be so different from those of men, who as we’ve
shown negotiate much more frequently? Remember Linda’s study in
which 20 percent of the women respondents (the equivalent of 22 mil-
lion people in the United States) said that they never negotiate at all?
Surely it can’t be that some women never encounter situations that offer net benefits from negotiating. And the economic explanation barely illuminates Gabriela’s predicament: Apparently, in asking for a raise for
herself, the cost that far outweighs any possible benefit is the internal
cost to herself—the intolerably high level of discomfort created by the
process of negotiating on her own behalf. Many men also feel nervous
about asking for a raise, but for a variety of reasons more of them seem
able to overcome their discomfort and ask anyway.
So what’s making women so nervous? What are the sources of Cath-
erine’s panic and Gabriela’s intense discomfort? Why would huge num-
bers of women strenuously avoid negotiation despite the very real costs
of not negotiating? This chapter looks at the broad impact of a problem that consistently plagues women, interfering with their ability to ask for
and get what they want: Anxiety.
Real Anxiety, Real Barriers
Although researchers have long speculated that women feel more anxi-
ety around negotiating than men and that their anxiety often prevents
them from negotiating, until now there hasn’t been much research
showing that this is true. But Linda’s web survey finally established that
women do indeed feel more anxiety and discomfort than men feel about
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negotiating. In the survey, respondents were asked to indicate their level
of agreement with statements such as: “I feel anxious when I have to
ask for something I want” and “It always takes me a long time to work
up the courage to ask for things I want.” Using their answers, Linda’s
team created a scale to measure each respondent’s level of “negotiation
apprehension.” True to expectations, women scored significantly higher
than men on this scale, with 2.5 times as many women as men feeling
“a great deal of apprehension” about negotiating.1 (This survey, you’ll
recall, included respondents of all ages and from a wide range of back-
grounds.)
Another part of the survey measured respondents’ “negotiation ap-
prehension” in a different way. Respondents were asked to read several
negotiation scenarios and then rate how anxious they would feel in each
situation. Women expressed significantly more apprehension about ne-
gotiating in all the scenarios except one (negotiating with family mem-
bers about where to go on vacation). Women felt particularly uneasy
<
br /> about scenarios involving work or activities in which they felt less ex-
pert than men (such as getting their cars fixed). In those scenarios, twice
as many women as men felt “very anxious” or “extremely anxious” about
conducting the negotiation.
Approaching this issue from yet another angle, the survey asked re-
spondents to read a list of words and indicate those that described how
they thought about negotiation. Men associated words such as exciting
and fun with negotiation far more than women, who were more likely
than men to choose words such as scary. In a related study, the organizational psychologist Michele Gelfand asked respondents to read a list
of metaphors and identify those that captured their experience of nego-
tiation. Where men chose metaphors such as winning a ballgame and a wrestling match, women were more likely to pick metaphors such as
going to the dentist as representative of their experience of negotiation.2
Linda has also found in her teaching that women express more anxi-
ety than men about negotiation. Linda frequently asks her negotiation
students to write down their reasons for taking her course. While men
tend to give answers like “I want to improve my negotiation skills,”
women often say things like “I hate negotiating and I want to learn how
to do it better” or “I tend to avoid negotiating because it makes me so
uncomfortable; I hope to change that.” The differences between the
responses of male and female students are so constant and predictable,
Linda can almost always identify the sex of the students from their an-
swers without looking at their names.
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Extreme discomfort with negotiating can afflict even extremely pow-
erful and successful women. In 2000, Linda conducted a negotiation
workshop with about 20 female physician executives—women doctors
in high-level managerial positions such as the chief medical officer of a
hospital and the vice president of an insurance company. In the course
of the workshop, Linda surveyed these physicians to discover their feel-
ings when they negotiate. A full two-thirds reported that negotiating
made them very nervous and a total of 86 percent expressed strong
negative feelings about negotiating, such as saying it makes them feel
insecure and defensive. Only 14 percent of these accomplished and
successful women expressed any positive emotions about negotiating,
such as saying that it makes them feel powerful and assertive.
The Consequences of Anxiety
Women’s greater anxiety about negotiating doesn’t just make the pro-
cess of negotiating harder for them (although it does that too). It also
prevents women from negotiating as much as men do. The survey re-
vealed that similar levels of anxiety prove to be far more disabling for
women than for men—more than three times as crippling. When a
woman’s anxiety jacks up 25 percent, for example, the likelihood that
she’ll go through with a negotiation decreases by 11 percent. But a 25
percent increase in a man’s anxiety decreases the likelihood he’ll ask for
what he wants only by 3 percent. So women not only experience more
anxiety about negotiation, their anxiety presents more of a stumbling
block for them than it does for men.3 Illustrating the different ways in
which men and women respond, David, 34, a hedge fund manager,
said that he knows he can make progress in a negotiation if he can
“endure the moment of discomfort.” Martha, the career counselor, in
contrast, said that she often avoids negotiating altogether because of
“the personal expense psychically and physically.” The prospect of that
“moment of discomfort” discourages her from negotiating at all.
This urge in women to avoid negotiating is so strong that a man in
Pittsburgh has launched a successful business negotiating the purchase
of cars for other people. Not surprisingly, most of his clients are
women—women willing to pay significant sums of money to avoid the
unpleasantness of negotiating. It’s not that these women are afraid
they’ll negotiate badly and end up paying too much for their cars. The
fees they pay for the service eat up whatever savings their “professional
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negotiator” wins for them. They just don’t want to have to negotiate. A
study by the business professors Devavrat Purohit and Harris Sondak
confirmed that saving money is not a driving goal for women in this
situation, and that they are willing to pay as much as $1,353 to avoid
negotiating the price of a car, compared to half as much, $666, for
men.4 This may explain why 63 percent of Saturn car buyers are
women—drawn to Saturn’s strategy of not negotiating prices.5
Anxiety and the Primacy of Relationships
What causes women’s greater feelings of discomfort and anxiety around
negotiating? Why are men more likely to concentrate on the issues in
a dispute or the advantages they can win for themselves, while women
are more likely to amplify the negative side of negotiating? In addition
to the reasons we’ve already discussed, many women worry about their
competence at negotiating: They worry that they’ll lose control of the
negotiation and make mistakes, that they’ll concede too quickly or be
thrown off guard or become intimidated.
Later in the book, we describe techniques for women to build up
their self-confidence around negotiating and strengthen their control
over the negotiation process—techniques that have been shown to
substantially increase women’s negotiating success. But before we ex-
plore those solutions, we need to understand one of the major causes
of female anxiety around negotiating—women’s fear that asking for
something they want may harm their relationship with the person they
need to ask. This fear often causes women’s anxiety to surge, making it
much harder for them to step over the “threshold for asking” and try
to negotiate.
Extensive literature in virtually every discipline in the social and be-
havioral sciences concludes that relationships play a more central role
in the lives of women than in the lives of men.6 This has been shown
to be true for small children and teenagers as well as for women and
men in all walks of life and at every stage of adulthood. What this means
is that women see the world—and themselves—through “relationship-
colored” glasses. Looking at life through these glasses, they don’t sepa-
rate the relationships involved from the particular issues being consid-
ered in working out a business deal, solving a problem at work, bar-
gaining with a merchant, or making decisions with a friend or family
member.
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Let’s look at some of this research. A 1982 study by the psychologists
William McGuire and Claire McGuire interviewed 560 children in
grades one through eleven. Each child was given five minutes to tell the
interviewer about him- or herself. The researchers found that the girls
were far mo
re likely than the boys to describe other people in their
conceptualizations of themselves.7 A 1988 study by two researchers at
the National Institutes of Health, Robert McCrae and Paul Costa Jr.,
turned up similar results among elderly people.8 Other research by the
psychologists Jane Bybee, Marion Glick, and Edward Zigler asked peo-
ple to describe their “ideal self.” They found that women were more
likely than men to include relationships in their descriptions.9
In one fascinating study, the psychologists Stephanie Clancy and Ste-
phen Dollinger recruited 201 college students to take part in a study
for extra credit. They instructed these students to collect 12 photo-
graphs that “describe who you are as you see yourself.” The students
themselves could take the photographs, they could ask other people to
take the photographs, or they could use photographs that had already
been taken. Clancy and Dollinger found that male students were more
likely to submit pictures that captured them engaged in an activity (such
as playing a sport), displaying prized possessions (such as a car), or
alone. Female students were more likely to submit pictures of them-
selves with other people. The authors concluded that women tend to
define themselves more in terms of their relationships while men tend
to define themselves more in terms of their abilities and accomplish-
ments—terms reflective of their individuality, independence, and sepa-
rateness.10 Another researcher, Sarah Taylor, repeated this study with a
class of ninth graders, with similar results: Girls were almost twice as
likely to submit pictures that showed them in connection with others
(69 percent of the girls’ photos were about connection compared to
only 38 percent of the boys’ photos) and 50 percent of the boys’ pictures
showed them alone whereas just 18 percent of the girls’ pictures were
solo shots.11
Although researchers disagree about the role of genetics in the differ-
ent importance of relationships to men and women, the treatment of
male and female children by adults at the very least encourages it.12
Researchers have found evidence, for example, that parents discuss
emotions and feelings with their daughters more than with their sons,
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