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Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever
Women Don't Ask
Negotiation and the Gender Divide
Princeton UP, 2003
What's inside?
Why do women make less money than men? In part, because they don’t ask for more — or don’t ask effectively.
Recommendation
The debate on gender equity often emphasizes that women earn less than men with similar experience. Authors Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever say that while women may indeed be the victims of external forces, they also to some extent may suffer from their own inability, unwillingness or aversion to negotiate or make demands. In fact, men negotiate four times as frequently as women, and get better results. Men are much more apt to make demands and ask for benefits, pay increases and so forth. Men make more money not necessarily because the system is overtly discriminatory - though it well may be - but because men demand more. The book tends to belabor its point, and sometimes the evidence does not seem as well-presented as it might have been, but getAbstract.com finds that it sheds useful light on a knotty social problem. Perhaps it will spur more women to fight - or to continue to fight - on their own behalf.
Summary
About the Authors
Linda Babcock is James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. Sara Laschever is a writer whose work has been published in The New York Times, New York Review of Books, Village Voice, Vogue and other publications.
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