Cambridge Business Association
Women Don't Ask
Book

Women Don't Ask

Negotiation and the Gender Divide

Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever
Princeton UP, 2003
Buy book or audiobook

Read or listen offline

Amazon Kindle
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×

Editorial Rating

8

Qualities

  • Innovative

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

Glass Ceilings

Women earn less pay than men. They get promoted less frequently and they are offered jobs that are less prestigious, less powerful, and less remunerative. They hit glass ceilings that men go right through. Why? Not necessarily because the game is overtly rigged against them, though in some ways it may be. Women do less well than men throughout their careers because they fail to negotiate effectively at the beginning of their careers.

Women don’t like to compete, and negotiation is competitive. Women who attempt to push for their own interests incur social disapproval and, because women fear social disapproval, they hold back. Because they hold back, they end up settling for less than they could get. The effect of these early failures compounds over time. A woman who accepts a pay rate 10% less than that of a man, because she fails to negotiate effectively on her first job, will pay for that failure all of her career because subsequent pay increases are based on that initial salary. The power of compounding can turn a sum as small as a $1,000 into a very significant amount of money during a 20 or 30 year span.

This handicap in the negotiation game...

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.

Comment on this summary