Women Don't Ask

by Linda Babcock

  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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  F E A R O F A S K I N G

  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,