he or she just complained about the compensation (an indirect method
of asking). The results were striking—almost nine times as many male
as female subjects asked for more money.3 Both male and female sub-
jects rated how well they’d played the game about equally, meaning
that women didn’t feel they should be paid less or should accept less
because they’d played poorly. There were also no gender differences in
how much men and women complained about the compensation (there
was plenty of complaining all around). The significant factor seemed to
be that for men, unhappiness with what they were offered was more
likely to make them try to fix their unhappiness—by asking for more.
In a much larger study, Linda, Michele Gelfand, Deborah Small, and
another colleague, Heidi Stayn, conducted a survey of several hundred
people with access to the Internet (subjects were paid ten dollars to log
on to a website and answer a series of questions).4 The survey asked
respondents about the most recent negotiations they’d attempted or
initiated (as opposed to negotiations they’d participated in that had
been prompted or initiated by others). For the men, the most recent
negotiation they’d initiated themselves had occurred two weeks earlier
on average, while for the women the most recent negotiation they’d
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initiated had occurred a full month before. Averages for the second-
most-recent negotiations attempted or initiated were about seven weeks
earlier for men and twenty-four weeks earlier for women.
These results suggest that men are asking for things they want and
initiating negotiations much more often than women—two to three
times as often.5 Linda and her colleagues wanted to be sure that this
discrepancy was not produced simply by memory lapses, however, so
the survey also asked people about the next negotiation they planned
to initiate. In keeping with the earlier findings, the negotiations planned
by the women were much further in the future than those being planned
by the men—one month ahead for the women but only one week ahead
for the men. This means that men may be initiating four times as many negotiations as women. The sheer magnitude of this difference is dramatic, especially since respondents to the survey included people of all
ages, from a wide range of professions, and with varied levels of educa-
tion. It confirms that men really do take a more active approach than
women to getting what they want by asking for it.
The more than 100 interviews we conducted in the process of writing
this book—with men and women from a range of professions (includ-
ing full-time mothers) and from Britain and Europe as well as the United
States—supported these findings.6 When asked to identify the last ne-
gotiation in which they had participated, the majority of the women we
talked to named an event several months in the past and described a
recognized type of structured negotiation, such as buying a car. (The
exceptions were women with small children, who uniformly said, “I
negotiate with my kids all the time.”) The majority of the men described
an event that had occurred within the preceding week, and frequently
identified more informal transactions, such as negotiating with a spouse
over who would take the kids to soccer practice, with a boss to pay for
a larger-size rental car because of a strained back, or with a colleague
about which parts of a joint project each team member would under-
take. Men were also more likely to mention more ambiguous situa-
tions—situations that could be construed as negotiations but might not
be by many people. For the most part, the men we talked to saw negoti-
ation as a bigger part of their lives and a more common event than the
women did.
One particularly striking aspect of our findings was how they broke
down by age. The changes brought about by the women’s movement
over the last 40 years had led us to expect greater differences between
older men and women than between their younger counterparts. And
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indeed when we discussed the ideas in the book with younger women
they often suggested that the problems we were studying were “boomer”
problems, afflicting older women but not themselves. To our surprise,
however, when we looked exclusively at respondents to the web survey
who were in their twenties and early thirties, the gender differences in
how often they initiated negotiations were similar to or slightly larger
than the differences in older cohorts (with men attempting many more
negotiations than women).7 In addition, both the starting salary study
and the Boggle study used subjects who were in their twenties. This
persuaded us that the tendency among women to accept what they’re
offered and not ask for more is far from just a “boomer” problem.
The Asking Advantage
But just because women don’t ask for things as often as men do, is that
necessarily a problem? Perhaps directly negotiating for advantage—ask-
ing for what you want—is a male strategy and women simply employ
other equally effective strategies to get what they want. This is an im-
portant point, but only partly accurate. Women often worry more than
men about the impact their actions will have on their relationships.
This can prompt them to change their behavior to protect personal
connections, sometimes by asking for things indirectly, sometimes by
asking for less than they really want, and sometimes simply by trying
to be more deserving of what they want (say, by working harder) so
they’ll be given what they want without asking. Women also frequently
take a more collaborative approach to problem-solving than men take,
trying to find solutions that benefit both parties or trying to align their
own requests with shared goals. In many situations, women’s methods
can be superior to those typically employed by men (we explore the
advantages of women’s different approaches and styles in the last chap-
ter of the book). Unfortunately, however, in our largely male-defined
work culture, women’s strategies can often be misinterpreted and can
leave them operating from a position of weakness. And in many cases,
the only way to get something is to ask for it directly.
So let’s look at the importance of asking.
First, consider the situation of the graduating students at Carnegie
Mellon, in which eight times as many men as women negotiated their
starting salaries. The women who did not negotiate started out not just
behind their male peers, but behind where they could and should have
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been. With every future raise predicated on this starting point, they
could be paying for this error for a long time—perhaps for the rest of
their careers.
Liliane, now 46, is an electrical engineer and a successful software
designer in New England’s competitive high-tech industry. Although
she earned excellent grades in college, she was so insecure when she
started out in her field that she felt she didn’t even deserve to be inter-
viewed for an engineering job—she was only “faking it.” Despite her
doubts, she quickly received an offer from a highly regarded company.
When the company’s personnel manager asked her what kind of salary
she was looking for, she said, “I don’t care what you pay me as long as
you give me a job.” A big smile spread across the personnel manager’s
face, she remembers. She later learned that he gave her the absolute
bottom of the range for her position, which was 10 to 20 percent less
than her peers were earning. It took her ten years to fix this inequity,
and she only did so, finally, by changing jobs.
Quantifying—in terms of dollars and cents—the loss to Liliane and
women like her from not negotiating their salaries produces sobering
results. Take the following example. Suppose that at age 22 an equally
qualified man and woman receive job offers for $25,000 a year. The
man negotiates and gets his offer raised to $30,000. The woman does
not negotiate and accepts the job for $25,000. Even if each of them
receives identical 3 percent raises every year throughout their careers
(which is unlikely, given their different propensity to negotiate and
other research showing that women’s achievements tend to be under-
valued), by the time they reach age 60 the gap between their salaries
will have widened to more than $15,000 a year, with the man earning
$92,243 and the woman only $76,870. While that may not seem like
an enormous spread, remember that the man will have been making
more all along, with his extra earnings over the 38 years totaling
$361,171. If the man had simply banked the difference every year in a
savings account earning 3 percent interest, by age 60 he would have
$568,834 more than the woman—enough to underwrite a comfortable
retirement nest egg, purchase a second home, or pay for the college
education of a few children. This is an enormous “return on investment”
for a one-time negotiation. It can mean a higher standard of living
throughout one’s working years, financial security in old age, or a top-
flight education for one’s kids.
The impact of neglecting to negotiate in this one instance—when
starting a new job—is so substantial and difficult to overcome that some
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researchers who study the persistence of the wage gap between men
and women speculate that much of the disparity can be traced to differ-
ences in entering salaries rather than differences in raises.8
Another estimate of a woman’s potential lost earnings from not nego-
tiating appears in the book Get Paid What You’re Worth by two profes-
sors of management, Robin L. Pinkley and Gregory B. Northcraft. They
estimate that a woman who routinely negotiates her salary increases will
earn over one million dollars more by the time she retires than a woman
who accepts what she’s offered every time without asking for more. And
that figure doesn’t include the interest on the extra amount earned.9
Even in such a small matter as the Boggle experiment, the gains to asking were great. Everyone who asked for more money received ten dollars,
more than three times as much as those who didn’t ask and received
only three dollars.
We all know that few employers will pay us any more than they need
to. They’re prepared to spend extra to get an applicant they want, but
happy to pay less if they can. Assuming applicants will negotiate, they
routinely offer less than they’re able to pay.10 But if we fail to ask for
more, it’s a rare employer who will insist that we’re not being paid
enough. A recent study shows that this is true even at institutions with
a committed policy against discriminating between men and women.
This study describes a man and a woman with equivalent credentials
who were offered assistant professorships by the same large university.
Shortly after the two were hired, a male administrator noticed that the
man’s salary was significantly higher than the woman’s. Looking into
it, he learned that both were offered the same starting salary. The man
negotiated for more, but the woman accepted what she was offered.
Satisfied, the administrator let the matter drop. He didn’t try to adjust
the discrepancy or alert the female professor to her mistake. The univer-
sity was saving money and enjoying the benefits of a talented woman’s
hard work and expertise. He didn’t see the long-term damage to his
institution and to society from not correcting such inequities (which
we explore later in the book), and she didn’t know how much she had
sacrificed by not negotiating the offer she’d received.11
Other new research emphasizes how important asking can be. Dee-
pak Malhotra, who is now a professor at the Harvard Business School,
assigned every student in a negotiation class he was teaching at the
Kellogg School of Management to “go negotiate something in the real
world.” The students were then asked to write a report about what had
happened. All of the students were part-timers who worked during the
day and took classes at night. Of the 45 students in the class, 35 negoti-
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ated something for themselves (the purchase of an antique, the rental
fee for an apartment, the salary for a job) and ten negotiated something
on behalf of an employer (a contract with a consultant or supplier, a
the students who negotiated something for themselves was $2,200. The
median amount saved by those who negotiated something for their em-
ployers was $390,000 (and these are just the medians; some people
saved much more). More significant than the amounts saved, however,
was the answer the students gave when asked to name the most im-
portant tactic that enabled them to achieve such extraordinary results:
“Choosing to negotiate at all.” They reported that the biggest benefit of
completing the exercise was learning that they could negotiate for things
(such as rental fees) that they never knew were negotiable.12
Because Molehills Become Mountains
We’ve demonstrated how negotiating your starting salary for your first
job can produce a gain of more than a half-million dollars by the end
of your career. This one example illustrates a truth that has become
better understood in recent years—that even small initial differences
can quickly turn into big discrepancies over time. As a result, the cumu-
lative effects of the gender gap in asking can be enormous. In the realm
of social equity, small inequalities between men and women, between
racial groups, or between heterosexuals and homosexuals have been
shown to accumulate rapidly and dramatically to one group’s advantage
and the other’s disadvantage.
To illustrate this phenomenon, three psychologists, Richard Martell,
David Lane, and Cynthia Emrich, looked at what would happen if men
in an organization consistently received slightl
y higher performance
evaluations than women.13 (In chapter 4 we explore the dynamics of
how this can occur even when there are no real differences in perfor-
mance or productivity.) The researchers constructed a hypothetical
“pyramid structure” organization, in which many people labor at the
bottom levels of the organization and successively fewer people are pro-
moted upward to the organization’s top levels. In this type of organiza-
tion, people with the highest performance evaluations tend to be pro-
moted more quickly from lower levels to higher ones. They also tend
to go further—to get promoted higher up the ladders of responsibility
and power than people with lower evaluations. The researchers noted
that even when differences in the performance evaluations awarded to
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men and women were miniscule (as low as 1 percent), and men and
women started out in identical positions in the organization, it didn’t
take long before the overwhelming majority of people at the highest
levels were men.
This is what sociologists call “accumulation of disadvantage.” As the
psychologist Virginia Valian writes in her book Why So Slow: The Ad-
vancement of Women: “It is unfair to neglect even minor instances of
group-based bias, because they add up to major inequalities.”14 The
bottom line is that even if women were asking for comparable things
and were equally successful at getting what they ask for when they do
ask, this simple difference in the “asking propensity” of men and women
would inevitably lead to men having more opportunities and accumu-
lating more resources. But women don’t ask for comparable things—
they ask for less when they do ask, and they usually get less, too. The
net result is a huge imbalance in the distribution of resources and op-
portunities between men and women. Because women ask for what
they want less often than men do, and therefore get what they want
much less of the time, the inequities in our society, and all the problems
they create, continue to pile up. Or, as Virginia Valian has written,
“molehills become mountains.”15
More than Money
The penalties for not negotiating extend far beyond the merely mone-
tary, too. As Pinkley and Northcraft demonstrate,
Applicants with identical experience and performance records but