Women Don't Ask
Recently I found myself in a situation where I was going to need to negotiate a salary. One of my information-project clients, a terrific start-up named Disaboom.com that was building an online community and information portal for people with disabilities, was making me the proverbial offer I couldn't refuse. The offer wasn't so much about money as about learning really cool new stuff: the site was going to utilize not just web 2.0 tools, but also a web 2.0 financial model. That is, content development was to a great extent going to be driven by user interests expressed through the site's blogs and forums.
I'd done a number of traditional website development projects, but none had made extensive use of web 2.0 tools or techniques. I wanted to see how it worked, and I wanted to see how I could translate my 1.0 information skills into a 2.0 business model. Absolutely an offer I couldn't refuse.
But then I realized I was going to have to negotiate a salary. Like many of the otherwise capable professional women I know, having to negotiate a financial package quickly throws me into a state of advanced anxiety. Happily, I happened to mention this to one of those aforesaid capable professional women who is also a good friend, and she suggested I read a book she'd heard about: Women Don't Ask, by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever (Bantam Dell, 2007).The result: I will be buying lunch for aforesaid good friend for many years to come....
The premise of Women Don't Ask is simple: over the lifetime of their careers, women make substantially less money than men because, unlike men, they simply don't ask for more. This starts with the initial job offer — women generally accept what's offered while men generally negotiate up to the tune of an additional 7% above the initial offer — and then compounds over a lifetime of smaller raises built on that smaller base salary. The statistics cited by the authors are stunning:
- In surveys, 2.5 times more women than men said they feel "a great deal of apprehension" about negotiating.
- Men initiate negotiations about four times as often as women.
- When asked to pick metaphors for the process of negotiating, men picked "winning a ballgame" and a "wrestling match," while women picked "going to the dentist."
- Women will pay as much as $1,353 to avoid negotiating the price of a car, which may help explain why 63 percent of Saturn car buyers are women.
- Women are more pessimistic about the how much is available when they do negotiate and so they typically ask for and get less when they do negotiate—on average, 30 percent less than men.
- 20 percent of adult women (22 million people) say they never negotiate at all, even though they often recognize negotiation as appropriate and even necessary.
- By not negotiating a first salary, an individual stands to lose more than $500,000 by age 60—and men are more than four times as likely as women to negotiate a first salary.
In one study, eight times as many men as women graduating with master's degrees from Carnegie Mellon negotiated their salaries. The men who negotiated were able to increase their starting salaries by an average of 7.4 percent, or about $4,000. In the same study, men's starting salaries were about $4,000 higher than the women's on average, suggesting that the gender gap between men and women might have been closed if more of the women had negotiated their starting salaries.
Women who consistently negotiate their salary increases earn at least $1 million more during their careers than women who don't.
And lest you think this tendency to avoid negotiating salaries and salary increases is a generational issue, i.e., the younger generation of women has nailed this issue and is now capably negotiating their way into consistently higher salaries, au contraire: the studies undertaken or reported by Babcock and Laschever indicate that age makes no difference when it comes to women's avoidance of any and all negotiating situations.
Fortunately, the authors don't just document this situation at length. They also describe the ways in which we trip ourselves us up (e.g., giving up too much too soon in a negotiation, being more invested in protecting the relationship than in getting a decent salary, feeling guilty about putting our own needs ahead of others', etc.), which then gives women an opportunity to recognize and understand their own self-sabotaging behaviors, and practice strategies for overcoming them. (Note, however, this is not a how-to book; you've pretty much got to figure out solutions on your own.)
After reading the book (and recognizing my own negotiation-avoidance tendencies), I sat down and wrote out scenarios that let me practice responses to various offers from my potential new employer. As I did so, I realized that sure enough, I was experiencing every one of the self-sabotaging emotions the authors had identified. The salary I was asking for might be too high, so I was mentally preparing myself to accept much less even before I had been asked to do so. I adored the guy I would be working for, and didn't want to damage our relationship or have him think less of me because "I was being greedy." And I knew that the company really needed the skills I could contribute, so felt guilty that I might be using that knowledge to my benefit, that is, I felt guilty exploiting an advantage. And these are just a few of the behaviors and attitudes the authors document. Believe me, if you're a woman in the workforce, regardless of your location on the career ladder, you'll probably see an awful lot of yourself in their stories and statistics....
The result for me of reading this book and acting on its conclusions: a salary that I feel reflects my contribution to the organization (more than initially offered), with benefits that reflect my life circumstances and priorities. Could I have negotiated for more? Possibly. But I decided my goal was not so much landing a big salary as in simply making myself go through the exercise of negotiating, to try to figure out strategies that got me beyond my usual reticence about asking. I wanted to learn how to be a Woman Who Asks, to be able to move beyond my discomfort into positive action. I wanted to learn what it felt like to become a capable advocate for myself.
I've gotta say, it feels damn good.