an obvious answer, “Um, sure,” he said. “I deserve the things I want—
yeah.” This is a confident answer, while the answers we heard from
many women tended to be far more tentative about what they deserved.
Mike, the entrepreneur, responded to this question with what
amounted to confusion, saying, “Interesting question! . . . The sense
that I deserve something is not a sense that I carry with me, generally.
Do I deserve this, or deserve that?” Where women are often preoccupied
with ascertaining what exactly they deserve, it doesn’t really cross
Mike’s mind to consider whether he deserves something or not—this
approach isn’t relevant to his thinking.
Another study looked at this question of entitlement in a different
way. Lisa Barron asked MBA students to negotiate for a hypothetical
job with an actual job recruiter; afterward, she interviewed the students
about their experience. To explore entitlement issues, she asked
whether the students thought they were entitled to a salary similar to
or greater than that offered to other job candidates. Of the subjects who
thought they belonged in the “entitled to more than others” category,
70 percent were men and 30 percent were women; of the subjects who
fit into the “entitled to the same as others” category, 29 percent were
men and 71 percent were women.28
Hoping to further illuminate this issue, Linda and her colleagues
created an entitlement scale to ask men and women directly about their
sense of entitlement. Using the web survey described in the introduc-
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tion, they presented people with a series of statements about what they
thought they might or might not deserve and asked them to rate, on a
seven-point scale, the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with
each statement. Not surprisingly, men scored significantly higher on
this scale than women.29 What was surprising was the extent of the
disparity: More than half the women respondents and almost twice as
many women as men turned out to be suffering from a low sense of
entitlement (52 percent of the women and only 29 percent of the men).
Only 6 percent of the women displayed extremely high levels of entitle-
ment, whereas almost twice as many men (11 percent) fell into this
category. In addition—and this is important, because the younger peo-
ple we interviewed insisted that this would not be the case—the gender
differences in entitlement for people in their twenties and early thirties
were just as large as the gender differences for older people.
All of these studies, using different approaches, go a long way toward
explaining why women are less likely than men to ask for more than
they already have: Women are not sure that they deserve more. As a result, even when women can imagine changes that might increase their productivity at work, their happiness at home, or their overall contentment
with their lives, their suppressed sense of entitlement creates real barri-
ers to their asking. Because they’re not dissatisfied with what they have
and not sure they deserve more, women often settle for less.
Where’s the Problem?
But if women are satisfied with the personal and professional rewards
they receive, where’s the problem? Who are we to decide that people
shouldn’t be satisfied with what they have? Does it do anyone a service
to persuade satisfied people to be unsatisfied? We think it does. We’re
convinced that as a society we are paying a substantial price for leaving
women undisturbed and unaware of how much they may be missing.
We wouldn’t be comfortable with a system that consistently paid people
born on even-numbered days less than it paid people born on odd-
numbered days—such a suggestion sounds preposterous. But women
make up half of our society, just as people born on even-numbered
days do. Why should we tolerate a society in which half our citizens
are arbitrarily undervalued and underpaid? Fairness as a principle
doesn’t work if applied only in response to demand; it must be safe-
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guarded and promoted even when its beneficiaries don’t realize what
they are missing.
Let’s start with the social costs. Undervaluing themselves and being
undervalued by society can be bad for women’s health. The close link
between a positive “self-perception” and psychological good health is
well-known.30 More recent research now indicates that the opposite is
also true. A negative self-evaluation combined with stress can lead to
depression,31 and two-thirds of all depressed adults are women.32 De-
pression is not only a problem in itself but can lead to other health
problems. As reported in the January 20, 2003, issue of Time magazine,
“Each year in the U.S., an estimated 30,000 people commit suicide,
with the vast majority of cases attributable to depression.” Time also points out that depression makes “other serious diseases dramatically
worse,” such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, epilepsy, and osteoporo-
sis.33 Unfortunate for each individual, depression often represents a real
cost to society as well—to provide care for the uninsured or underin-
sured at a time when health-care costs are skyrocketing. (And most
people are underinsured for mental health care.) Then there’s the ques-
tion of lost productivity due to depression, which Time estimates “costs the U.S. economy about $50 billion a year.”34
We’re not claiming, of course, that persuading women to ask for
what they want more of the time, and convincing society to accept and
encourage this, will do away with depression and increase production.
But, as one set of researchers put it: “Because of the potentially serious
implications of negative self-perceptions for achievement behavior and
psychological health, more attention should be devoted to discovering
factors that produce inaccurately negative self-perceptions. A better un-
derstanding of the causes of negative self-perceptions may enable us to
prevent or at least alleviate these biases, which presently may hold back
some females and males from achieving their full potential.”35
There are other social costs as well from women as a group being
unequally rewarded for their work. With many types of benefits (such
as social security, disability insurance, unemployment insurance, and
pensions) linked to one’s salary, paying women less means apportioning
inadequate amounts of these “rainy day” guarantees to huge numbers
of the populace. As a result “American women over sixty-five are more
than twice as likely to be poor as men of the same age.”36 In addition
to forcing so many women to struggle at the ends of their lives, leaving
this situation uncorrected imposes substantial economic costs on soci-
ety to support all of these indigent female elderly.
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The phenomenon that Faye Crosby has called “the denial of personal
disadvantage” also contributes to the social costs we all pay for underes-
timating the value of
women’s work and time. Since, as Crosby has
shown, “people typically imagine themselves to be exempt from the
injustices that they can recognize as affecting their membership or refer-
ence groups,”37 a woman may see that other women earn lower salaries
than comparable men and yet believe herself to be exempt from this
problem. This is unfortunate for several reasons. First, at a personal
level, because this woman doesn’t recognize the reality of her situation,
she may take no action to fight it. Second, at a broader societal level,
people are more likely to push for changes in which they have a per-
sonal stake—changes from which they themselves will benefit. The
longer women labor under the misapprehension that they personally
are doing okay, the longer it will take for the system as a whole to adjust
this fundamental and counterproductive inequity.38
There are real market costs as well. As we already reported, in the
year 2000, women owned 40 percent of all the businesses in the United
States (a total of 9.1 million female-owned businesses) but received only
2.3 percent of the available venture capital dollars.39 How to explain
this? Although there are undoubtedly many contributing causes, Joanna
Rees Gallanter, a venture capitalist herself, has observed, “Women are
often not comfortable talking about what they’re worth. They’ll go in
to pitch a project and naturally put a lower value on it than men do.”40
You may think—well, that’s too bad, that’s business. Businesses go
under every day. But sheer scale puts this problem into perspective. If
40 percent of the businesses in this country may be undercapitalized,
this puts far more than the long-term survival of a few businesses at
risk. It puts at risk the employees of those 9.1 million businesses, the
fiscal health of the communities those businesses serve, and at some
level the health of our national economy.
What are some other costs? Just as a person who decides to buy a
bottle of wine usually assumes that a higher-priced bottle will be of
better quality than a more inexpensive one, employers tend to assume
that applicants with better compensation records are more capable than
those who have been paid less. Because women’s salary histories don’t
always accurately reflect their true capabilities, employers sometimes
fail to hire the most talented people for the jobs they need to fill, and
their companies as well as the female applicants lose out. With this
happening in every type of business at every level, we as a society are
inevitably misusing our resources—our human capital. We may also be
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limiting potential business growth and related gains in productivity (a
major index of economic health), if more than 50 percent of our citizens
are not making full use of their talents or being given the opportunity
to do the best work of which they are capable.
Finally, businesses suffer when managers don’t know what their em-
ployees need to do their jobs well. Influential management texts, such
as The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First, by Jeffrey Pfeffer, stress that being a good manager means keeping your employees
happy and productive.41 An employee who doesn’t realize that changes
in her working conditions could improve the quality of her work makes
her manager’s job that much harder. An employee who doesn’t commu-
nicate to her boss that her work performance is being undermined by
financial strain, a conflict with a coworker, or a mismatch between her
talents and the needs of a particular project prevents her boss from
managing her most effectively. This is not just theoretical. Many senior
people we interviewed said that it helps them to know what their people
want. Rather than frowning on employees who ask for more money,
new opportunities, or different “perks” and benefits, these managers
appreciate knowing what they can do to make their employees’ lives
easier and their work better. The trap of low expectations combined
with a depressed sense of entitlement doesn’t merely punish women by
preventing them from recognizing and pursuing changes that might
improve their situation. It deprives their bosses, colleagues, friends, and
intimates of valuable information about them. In its worst manifesta-
tions, it wastes women’s talents and prevents them from realizing their
full potential.
As the sociologist Cynthia Fuchs Epstein has written, “it is in the
nature of human motivation that when people are not appropriately
rewarded for their efforts and contributions, they cease to aim high.”42
She also points out that “women, like men, find that when others honor
their contributions, listen to their ideas, and acknowledge their [work],
they perform at higher levels.”43
Managers also don’t want to lose good people because their employ-
ees don’t ask for what they want and then get lured away by better
offers. In many cases, departing employees might have saved themselves
the trouble of changing jobs simply by telling their managers what they
needed to improve their working conditions and increase their job satis-
faction. The responsibility goes the other way too. Managers need to
realize that women are less likely to ask for promotions or raises that
haven’t been given to them. If managers don’t take steps to correct the
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when such discrepancies are discovered. They also risk souring morale
in their organizations and seeing talented women leave for better-paying
jobs when they realize that they’ve been treated shabbily. Worker turn-
over costs businesses millions of dollars every year—and much of it
could be avoided if managers made a point of finding out what their
employees want and need, and workers felt free to tell them.
Here’s an example from Linda’s own experience. Two male col-
leagues became eligible for promotion at the same time she did. Al-
though all three of them were equally qualified for promotion, the two
men were promoted and Linda was not. Linda had an excellent relation-
ship with her dean and couldn’t understand how he’d failed to recog-
nize her significant professional accomplishments and her contribu-
tions to the school. She felt angry and unappreciated, and she thought
the dean should know how she felt and want to do something about it.
Linda was lucky because she knew she was unhappy, she could
clearly identify what she wanted (the promotion), and she felt confident
that she deserved the promotion she wanted (perhaps because she was
comparing herself to both male and female colleagues). So she spoke
to her boss. The colleagues who’d been promoted, it turned out, had
received offers from other institutions. They’d threatened to leave unless
they were promoted. The dean wanted to keep them, so he gave them
what they asked for. Because Linda hadn’t asked to be promoted, the
dean n
ever even thought of her—she was off his radar. Once she asked,
he readily agreed to promote her too.
As Linda left the dean’s office, the words “I’m glad you asked” rang
in her ears. The dean made it clear that knowing what she wanted was
useful information: He wanted to take good care of his people and be
a good manager; Linda was a valuable employee, and asking for what
she wanted helped him do that.
Greater Expectations
Fortunately, women can learn to avoid the trap of low expectations.
Research has identified situations in which gender differences in entitle-
ment disappear—situations that help us think about ways in which
women can overcome their tendency to underestimate what they de-
serve. In the 1984 study mentioned earlier in which people were asked
to review application folders and predict the success of incoming college
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freshman (the study in which men paid themselves 63 percent more
on average than women did), the researchers, Major, McFarlin, and
Gagnon, also ran a variant condition that produced interesting results.
In this condition, they left a bogus list at the students’ desks that listed
what earlier participants in the study had paid themselves. This list
contained eight names (four male and four female) along with the
amount each subject had paid him- or herself. The average amounts
male and female subjects had paid themselves were about the same. In
this condition, they found, male and female subjects paid themselves
about the same amount, which corresponded to the average of this list.
The researchers also ran two other conditions. One used a bogus list in
which the men paid themselves more on average than the women and
the other used a list in which the women paid themselves more than
the men. Both of these conditions produced no gender differences in
what men and women paid themselves.44 A similar study published
eight years later (in 1992) by Brenda Major and another colleague,
Wayne Bylsma, reached the same conclusion—gender differences dis-
appear when men and women receive the same information about the
“going rates” for given jobs.45
These studies tell us that in unambiguous situations that provide
women with appropriate comparison information, knowledge of what