women’s (4.3 is 59 percent higher than 2.7). If the men at every stage
of their careers consistently negotiate raises that are 59 percent higher
than the raises women in the same positions negotiate, by the time they
retire the men will have earned far more than the women.
To get a sense of how much more, consider another example: Say a
man and a woman both receive identical first job offers at age 22 for
$35,000. The man, by negotiating, increases his offer by 4.3 percent to
$36,505, while the woman also negotiates but can only increase her
offer by 2.7 percent to $35,945. Although the difference between the
two figures—only $560—may seem small, let’s look at what happens
if they both negotiate identical percentage increases every year until
they retire at age 65 (the man raising his salary by 4.3 percent each year
and the woman raising hers by only 2.7 percent). By the time they
retire, his salary will be $213,941, while hers will be only $110,052—
about half of what he’s making. Even worse, if he banks the difference
between their salaries in an account earning 3 percent a year, by the
time they retire he will have accumulated $2,120,731. And these calcu-
lations don’t account for the woman’s losses in retirement and pension
benefits, which are typically tied to earnings. This is a perfect example
of the “accumulation of disadvantage” phenomenon: The difference be-
tween a 2.7 percent raise and a 4.3 percent raise doesn’t seem that big.
But molehills can rapidly become mountains—and small differences
add up to huge disparities over time.
This chapter examines why women often get less than men when
they negotiate, focusing on their tendency to ask for too little and con-
cede too much or too soon. It looks at women’s lack of confidence in
their negotiating abilities and explores ways for women to establish—
and attain—ambitious goals for themselves when they negotiate.
Goals, Goals, Goals
Delia and John, both medical researchers with Ph.D.s, were hired by
the same medical school at the same time, right out of graduate school.
They were both offered the same starting salaries and the same basic
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budgets to set up their labs. Delia negotiated and successfully raised
both her salary and her budget a modest amount. John also negotiated
for a higher salary and bigger budget, but he asked for more than Delia
asked for—and got more. In addition, John asked for a salary for a full-
time research assistant. Having both the bigger budget and the regular
assistant boosted John’s research productivity substantially. As a result,
he was promoted more rapidly than Delia, and the gap between their
salaries widened even further.
Why do men outperform women in negotiations? Targets—the goals
men and women take into negotiations—have been shown to make a
critical difference.5 John went into his negotiation aiming to get more
than Delia aimed to get, he asked for more, and he got more. Extensive
research on the relationship between goal-setting and performance—for
example, among dieters and recovering addicts—has found that setting
concrete, challenging goals consistently improves results.6 Research
confirms that this is true for negotiating as well: People who go into
negotiations with more ambitious targets tend to get more of what they
want than people who go in with more moderate goals. In the Ivy
League MBA study mentioned above, Linda and her colleagues observed
that a 30 percent increase in a person’s goal going into a negotiation
produced, at a minimum, a 10 percent increase in the negotiated
amount he or she was able to obtain.7 This means that if one person
goes into a salary negotiation with a target of $50,000, for example, and
another goes in with a target of $65,000 (which is 30 percent higher),
the person hoping to get $50,000 might get $50,000, but the other
person, who aimed higher, would have a good chance of coming away
with $55,000 (10 percent more).
Higher targets have been shown to improve negotiation outcomes
for two reasons: They influence the “first offer” a person makes in a
negotiation and they influence how quickly or slowly a person concedes
from his or her opening position. A first offer is like an opening move
in a chess game—it signals a player’s intentions, gives an idea of what
kind of player he or she is, and sets the stage for everything that follows.
First offers play a critical role in producing good negotiated outcomes
because they influence the other negotiators’ expectations for what you
will accept and provide a starting point for the interaction. They also
tend to lead to higher final agreements. The impact of higher targets on
first offers was demonstrated by another study Linda conducted with
Hannah Riley and Kathleen McGinn in which they found a direct one-
to-one correlation between targets and first offers—meaning that each
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dollar increase in a person’s goal translated into an increase in his or
her first offer of about a dollar. So the higher the goal, the higher the
first offer, and the higher the first offer, the higher the likely negotiated
settlement.8
Setting high goals is also important because a lack of ambitious goals
contributes to another negotiation misstep particularly common among
women: conceding too much and conceding too quickly. Someone with
relatively modest goals often makes concessions faster than someone
with higher goals, who will frequently hold out longer to get more.9
People who go into a negotiation thinking only about their “bottom
line”—the minimum they will accept—may concede as soon as they
receive an offer equal or close to that bottom line.10
Carol, 38, a doctor, described negotiating with her husband when
they bought the house in which they live. “There were two houses that
I liked,” she explained:
I liked the house that we bought, and I liked another house. I had
narrowed it down to the two, and in retrospect over time it’s become
clear to me that we probably would have been better off in that other
house just because of some of the things it offered that ours doesn’t
have . . . but my husband really didn’t like the other house and he
really wanted the one that we got, and so we went with it. But you
know, I kind of wonder if I should have fought harder for that other
house. . . . I did not persist at all. . . . I was happy that he liked one
of the five that I had picked.
Carol’s goal and bottom line going into this negotiation had been the
same: merely for her husband to agree to buy one of the houses she
liked. If she had set a higher goal—for him to recognize and consider
the comparative virtues of each choice or to understand her reasons
for preferring one of the houses over the others—she might not have
conceded so quickly. She might also have come away with a superior
outcome and been spared, years later, the regret o
f realizing that they
might have made a better choice.
In contrast, people who go into a negotiation focusing on the top
amount they’d like to earn or the best possible outcome tend to hold
out longer.11 Kirk, a television producer, moved from Chicago to a
smaller city in the Pacific Northwest when his wife changed jobs. Be-
cause of his talent and experience, he quickly found himself at one of
the major network affiliates talking to the station manager about a job.
Kirk had won several prizes for his work in Chicago, but he knew that
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this was a smaller television market and he might not be able to earn
as much as he’d been making before. But he also knew that the station
was engaged in a fierce battle for market share with its competitors and
that the station manager really wanted to hire him. So he asked for
$85,000, thinking he’d probably get $60,000 or at most $70,000.
When the station manager seemed to balk, instead of conceding, Kirk
said, “That’s what the market is telling me I can get right now.” The
station manager leaned back in his chair, scratched his head, and finally
said, “Okay, I’ll give it to you. I think you’re worth it.” If Kirk had asked
for less, obviously he would have gotten less, and if he’d backed down
when the station manager resisted his original figure, he would have
gotten less too. He later learned that he was making $25,000 more than
any other producer at the station. Although Kirk’s credentials undoubt-
edly accounted for some of this difference, both the high target he took
into his negotiation with the station manager and his resistance to con-
ceding surely made a big difference as well.
Why the Differences?
We know that women typically set less aggressive goals than men, make
more modest first offers,12 and concede more rapidly. One of Linda’s
studies with Hannah Riley and Kathleen McGinn found male negotia-
tors setting goals that were about 15 percent more aggressive than those
of female negotiators in comparable circumstances.13 Looking simply at
the salary realm (although setting high targets produces better results
in almost any type of negotiation), the consistency with which women’s
lower goals limit how much women are paid has persuaded some re-
searchers that the gender gap in wages could be all but eliminated if
men and women were to set comparable goals.14
But why does this happen? We’ve already discussed some of the
causes: Women frequently feel unsure about what they deserve, worry
that asking for too much may threaten a relationship, or fear that the
people around them will react badly if they ask for too much. In addi-
tion, women tend to be less optimistic than men about what they can
get from a negotiation. They also feel less comfortable than men with
risk taking and often lack confidence in their negotiating ability—mak-
ing them ask only for things that will be easy to get.
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The Power of Optimism
Angela, the community development bank marketing director, thinks
that men ask for more, in part, because “in their heads the pie is a lot
bigger than it is in women’s heads.” Research seems to bear this out. In
one study, male and female business students considered a hypothetical
job description for a management position and estimated the highest
amount the company would pay for this position. Male students esti-
mated this amount to be much greater than female students thought it
would be.15
In another study, students were given detailed information about the
facts of a dispute in a pretrial negotiation and then assigned to play the
role of either plaintiff or defendant. As part of the exercise, the students
were asked to estimate the amount that a judge or jury would award
the plaintiff should the case go to trial. When men were playing the
plaintiff role, their estimates of this amount were significantly greater
than the estimates of women playing the same role—9 percent higher,
on average, which in a large settlement could mean a difference of hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars.16
This greater optimism about what is available and possible gives men
a powerful advantage at the negotiating table. Because they believe
(rightly or wrongly) that they are in a better bargaining position than
women feel themselves to be, men often develop more aggressive tar-
gets, present more extreme first offers, and make fewer concessions. In
many cases, this means they also come away from the bargaining table
with a better deal for themselves or for their side of the negotiation.
Why are men more optimistic about available rewards? Not much
research has been done in this area, but one area of study called “risk
assessment” allows us to speculate a little. Psychologists who study risk
assessment measure people’s perceptions about the degree of danger
posed by a range of substances (nuclear waste, asbestos, tap water),
activities (sun tanning, irradiating food, burning fossil fuels, commer-
cial air travel), and public health and security threats (bacteria in food,
AIDS, terrorism). In every case but one (the burning of fossil fuels—
an odd exception), men see these things as less risky than women.17
Revealingly, however, whites also see them as less risky than nonwhites.
This suggests to researchers that these differences stem from sociopoliti-
cal and cultural influences rather than from biological differences be-
tween men and women. As Paul Slovic, an expert on risk assessment,
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explained, “Perhaps white males see less risk in the world because they
create, manage, control and benefit from many of the major technolo-
gies and activities. Perhaps women and non-white men see the world
as more dangerous because in many ways they are more vulnerable,
because they benefit less from many of its technologies and institutions,
and because they have less power and control over what happens in
their communities and their lives.”18
Similarly, we can wonder whether men’s experience has taught them
different things about the availability of resources. Since men do accu-
mulate more financial resources than women in their lifetimes, perhaps
they learn to expect more. Maybe men believe that more is available to
them in part because, in our society at least, more is available to them.
This general optimism about what they can get carries over into other
types of negotiations as well. Elaine, the district court judge, told us
that when she was a litigator, “there were men who would come into a
negotiation and press a point regardless of whether it made the slightest
bit of sense. They were prepared to take more outrageous positions.”
This could be an advantage because “a man who is seeking out a ridicu-
lous position and sticking to it could force the other side to accept just
because he was going to hold on longer.” But it could be a disadvantage,
too
, if she or another opposing counsel was “prepared to litigate to the
end”—to go to court, in other words.
This points up the existence of a dark side to men’s more optimistic
perceptions of how much they can get from a negotiation. Because they
more often over estimate their alternatives and occasionally aim too high, men end up without agreements more often than women do.19 This is
undeniably bad for men because in most cases they would be better off
with agreements. In this light, women have the advantage—an advan-
tage we discuss in detail in chapter 8.
The Power of Information
Their lack of optimism about available rewards can lead women to pre-
determine their own fate before a negotiation begins—by asking for too
little they limit what they can get in advance. Janice, the receptionist at
a health club, was asked by the manager of the gym to take over sched-
uling and supervising the club’s personal trainers. When Janice agreed,
the manager asked her what she wanted to be paid. “I totally botched
the negotiation process and sold myself way too low,” Janice reported.
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“Personal trainers get paid way more by the hour than I was making as
a receptionist so I just asked for the personal trainers’ rate, which
seemed like a lot to me. I wasn’t even sure I could get that.” Janice’s
boss actually said he would pay her a little more than she asked for since
her new responsibilities fell into a supervisory category with relation to
the personal trainers, and therefore by all rights should be more highly
paid. But Janice hadn’t thought about the value of the new role she
would be filling. She thought only about what she had been earning
before as a receptionist. This led her to set a target for the negotiation
that was way too low. Although her boss was nice enough to pay her
more than she asked for (a pretty rare occurrence), she may well have
been able to get even more had she set a higher goal for herself. Before
future negotiations, she told us, she will research the going rate for the
kind of work she’s being asked to do, and use that information—rather
than her earnings history or her own sense of self-worth—to figure out
what she should ask for.
This is the right tack for her to take. Research finds that using market
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