thereby teaching girls to be more attentive to the feelings of those
around them and, by implication, to take more responsibility for those
feelings.13 This is a lesson that girls may also be explicitly taught. Sandy,
117
C H A P T E R 5
the former commercial lending officer, was a talented gymnast when
she was young. Most of the other girls on Sandy’s team specialized in
one event, but Sandy was talented enough to perform well in several
events. At one point, her coach took her aside and told her that Cindy,
one of her teammates, was upset because Sandy was so good at Cindy’s
event. The message could not have been clearer: Sandy’s achievements
and potential were less important than the feelings of another girl. More
generally, Sandy was being told that she needed to curb her own ambi-
tions—she needed to strive and hope for less—in order to protect the
feelings of the people around her. It’s hard to imagine a coach telling a
male athlete to perform less well to spare the feelings of another boy.
Different Views of the Self
Whatever the causes, the different importance men and women place
on relationships has led psychologists to conclude that men and women
see themselves differently or have different “self-schemas” or “construals
of the self.”14 Psychologists define a self-schema as your internal sense
of who you are and what you’re like—an interior self-portrait made up
of how you experience your own personality and how you believe other
people see you.15 Your self-schema influences the ways in which you
perceive the world around you—it provides a “filter” through which
you process information, understand events, and organize your memo-
ries. It is also a prime motivator of your behavior.
In an impressive piece of scholarship that ties together research find-
ings from many disciplines, the social psychologists Susan Cross and
Laura Madson argue that men have more independent self-schemas
and women have more interdependent ones. People with independent
self-schemas—like many men—define themselves in terms of their dis-
tinction from others and pay less attention to the impact of their actions
on the people around them. They focus on promoting their personal
preferences and goals and seek out relationships that tend to be more
instrumental than intimate, more numerous, and less personally bind-
ing.16 People with interdependent self-schemas, in contrast, define
themselves in terms of their connections to others—“relationships
are viewed as integral parts of the person’s very being.”17 They see
their actions in terms of how they will influence people around them,
and one of their primary goals is to develop strong relationships and
protect them.
118
F E A R O F A S K I N G
Not surprisingly, men’s and women’s different self-schemas can have
a profound impact on how they feel about asking for what they want.18
In one study, Lisa Barron observed male and female students as they
participated in a job negotiation. Afterward, she interviewed them to
understand their goals and strategies. Based on these interviews, she
divided the participants into two categories: those who saw the negotia-
tion as a way of advancing their interests and those who saw the negotia-
tion as a way of furthering their acceptance by others (such as the hiring
manager or others in the organization). Barron found that men made
up 72 percent and women made up only 28 percent of those in the
“advancement” category while men made up only 29 percent and
women made up 71 percent of those in the “acceptance” category.19
This strongly suggests that men are more likely to see the “instrumental”
side of a negotiation (they see it as “just business”) and women are more
likely to focus on the interpersonal side, where relationship concerns
are salient.
Our interviews produced numerous examples of this different point
of view. Becky, the journalist, said “When I go into a negotiation . . . I
think about the relationship first. . . . I think about maintaining that
relationship before I think about my own [needs] really.” David, the
hedge fund manager, said just the opposite: “I don’t worry about hurt-
ing feelings in a professional context.”
Negotiation Equals Conflict
Women’s strong urge to foster and protect relationships can make many
of them fear that a disagreement about the outcome of a negotiation—
a disagreement about the issues being discussed—actually represents a
personal conflict between the negotiators involved. Negotiation scholars
Deborah Kolb and Gloria Coolidge write: “Negotiation, conceived as a
context in which conflict and competition are important, may not be a
comfortable place for many women” because it puts them “in opposition
to others.”20 That is, women often feel uncomfortable negotiating even
in situations in which this type of controlled conflict is expected and
appropriate, because promoting conflict is foreign to their self-schemas
and their sense of identity. Men, for the most part, are less likely to
believe that a disagreement about issues also means a conflict between
the negotiators. They also typically worry less about the damaging ef-
fects of conflict.
119
C H A P T E R 5
Researchers believe that childhood socialization and styles of play
create these different attitudes toward disagreement and conflict. By
about age three, they point out, girls prefer playing with girls and boys
prefer playing with boys. This preference intensifies with age—by age
six, children play with other children of the same sex about eleven times
as much as they do with children of the opposite sex.21 This is important
because boys and girls play differently—and learn different things from
the ways in which they play.
Girls tend to play in small groups and form close relationships with
one or two other girls. Their most important goals involve increasing
intimacy and preserving connection.22 As a result, girls, much more
than boys, engage in activities in which everyone is equal and there are
no winners and losers.23 When there is a dispute during play, girls will
frequently end a game in order to protect the relationships among the
players.24 Girls make polite suggestions to one another and prefer to
agree rather than disagree. From these forms of play, girls develop a
strong preference for cooperation and for avoiding conflict, and they
discover that avoiding conflict can be a successful strategy for achieving
their important goal of maintaining close relationships.
Boys, in contrast, play in larger groups than girls and their play is
rougher.25 Boys issue direct orders to one another far more than girls
do; and boys’ play involves more competition, conflict, and struggle for
dominance.26 When boys talk, their agenda is one of self-assertion.27 If
there is a dispute in a game, boys deal with it by implementing agreed-
upon rules.28 Through these types of
behavior, boys learn that they can
be aggressive in their interactions without really hurting each other or
damaging their relationships. They also learn that competition is fun,
that those on the opposite sides of a contest can still be friends, and
that asserting themselves can be a successful strategy for attaining their
goals (such as winning the game they’re playing). In the process, they
discover that they can interact with others in aggressive ways without
harming their relationships.29 Even more important, they learn how to do this—how to oppose others without harming their relationships. In
her 1994 book Talking from 9 to 5, Deborah Tannen describes the fol-
lowing situation: “A woman told me she watched with distaste and dis-
tress as her office-mate heatedly argued with another colleague about
whose division would suffer necessary cuts in funding, but she went
into shock when, shortly after this altercation, the two men were as
friendly as ever. ‘How can you pretend that fight never happened?’ she
120
F E A R O F A S K I N G
asked the man who shared her office. He responded, ‘Who’s pretending
it never happened?’ as puzzled by her question as she was by his behav-
ior. ‘It happened,’ he said, ‘and it’s over.’ ”30
With fewer opportunities to engage in “friendly competition” and
perhaps both a natural inclination and strong social reinforcement to
develop and safeguard relationships, girls and women may be slower
to learn how to do this. Martha, the career counselor, said: “I do think
[for men] there’s that sense of ‘this isn’t personal, we’re on the soccer
field, this is a battle, but once we step off we will be fine.’ That kind of
depersonalization of the interaction is something that I definitely don’t
feel like I got as a girl growing up. I felt like it was instilled upon me
that it was all personal.” Because women have had more limited experi-
ence of conflict than men, they have also had fewer opportunities to
learn how to deal with conflict in ways that don’t threaten their relationships—they don’t have those skills.31
Lynn, a 25-year-old professional nanny, moved into an apartment
with two roommates who had already been living there for some time.
Lynn’s bedroom was extremely small and she wanted to move a book-
case and a desk into the living room, but her roommates had left no
space for her. Afraid that she would be branded a “troublemaker” and
that her relationship with them would start off badly, she never asked
whether room could be made for her things. “I worry that if a conflict
occurs when I’m in a negotiation in any realm it will cause stress in the
relationship,” she explained. “If the relationship is important . . . you
don’t want to hurt the relationship with the people you’re negotiating
with.” Deborah Tannen, in her 1990 book You Just Don’t Understand,
observed that when faced with a choice between holding fast to personal
goals and backing down from a request in order to preserve harmony
in a relationship, many women will choose the latter.32 Although men
often do this as well, evidence suggests that women do it more.
The strength of women’s need to avoid any hint of conflict can influ-
ence their behavior even when there’s no need for them to care about
their relationship with the other negotiator. Martha, the career coun-
selor, tells a story that illustrates how a woman’s reflexive impulse to
worry about relationships can prevail even when all objective evidence
indicates that the relationship at stake is not important:
I remember getting into an awful dispute with somebody who was
handling some money for my mother. He disappeared basically after
121
C H A P T E R 5
he started handling it, and eventually I got it back. But I remember a
friend of mine saying, “Why are you so worried that he’s not going
to like you? You know this guy should be in jail.” And there was that
kind of mentality that said in addition to getting the money back I
also had to make sure that I kept everybody happy, and that’s a real
struggle. . . . He wasn’t part of my social circle. I never ran into him.
He probably should have been in jail.
The impulse to pay attention to relationships is so deeply imbedded
in women’s psyches that they rarely see any of their interactions as not
having a relationship dimension, Deborah Kolb and Gloria Coolidge
contend.33 So when they find themselves in situations, like Martha’s, in
which there is no potential for future interaction and the opinion of
the other negotiator can have no impact on their lives, they don’t make
the adjustment that says “okay, I don’t need to care about this relation-
ship”—because caring is the routine way in which they approach
things.
Women also worry more about how asking for something may
threaten a relationship because women typically suffer more when their
relationships suffer.34 This is because the self-esteem of people with
interdependent self-schemas depends in good part on the relationships
they have with others, research has shown.35 As a result, a rocky busi-
ness interaction or a negotiation from which the other negotiator leaves
unhappy may present a painful challenge to a woman’s self-esteem. In
her book Toward a New Psychology of Women, professor of psychiatry
Jean Baker Miller explains that “women’s sense of self becomes very
ations and relationships. Eventually, for many women the threat of dis-
ruption of connections is perceived not just as a loss of a relationship
but as something closer to a total loss of self.”36
The self-esteem of people with independent self-schemas suffers less
when relationships are threatened. Several studies support this supposi-
tion. One shows that not being forgiven by a friend damages a woman’s
self-esteem more than it damages a man’s, for example.37 Another found
that for women there is a positive association between self-esteem and
their perceived degree of personal “connectedness” to others—but no
association between these for men.38 No one likes to be rejected, of
course, but rejection seems to hit women harder on average than it hits
men—and seems to represent more of a deterrent to their asking.
122
F E A R O F A S K I N G
The End of Anxiety
Women’s fears are not entirely unfounded, of course. Aggressive negoti-
ation behavior, such as making extreme demands, refusing to concede,
and bullying the other side, can stir up a lot of conflict and damage
relationships. But this doesn’t mean that women should avoid negotia-
tion altogether. Nor does it mean that women should forget about their
anxieties, “act like men,” and ignore the impact of their behavior on
their relationships. Instead, women need to acknowledge that they al-
most always have dual goals in a negotiation—issue-related goals and
relationship goals—and that they need to find ways to achieve both.
Fortunately, the past 20 years of negotiation research have shown that
everyone, both men and women, can benefit by embracing both of these
goals when they negotiate.
From Contest to Cooperation
The first step toward achieving both issue-related and relationship goals
in a negotiation—and reducing negotiation anxiety—involves refram-
ing the interaction. This means approaching it not as a contest or a
competition, but as a chance to share ideas with the opposing negotiator
and work together to solve problems that affect you both. In their book
The Shadow Negotiation: How Women Can Master the Hidden Agendas
That Determine Bargaining Success, Deborah Kolb and Judith Williams,
both negotiating scholars, explain that when negotiators “take steps to
insure that the negotiation conversation unfolds as a collaborative dia-
logue rather than an adversarial contest,” the process of negotiation can
become far more productive and lead to “solutions that would never
have occurred to anyone independently.”39 The influential negotiation
book Getting to Yes, by Roger Fisher and William Ury, first introduced this approach to a wider audience and provides numerous suggestions
for how to make it work. One of the principal strategies recommended
by Fisher and Ury involves using what they call “interest-based” rather
than “position-based” bargaining. A simple example from Getting to Yes
demonstrates the difference between the two:
Consider the story of two men quarreling in a library. One wants the
window open and the other wants it closed. They bicker back and
forth about how much to leave it open: a crack, halfway, three quar-
123
C H A P T E R 5
ters of the way. No solution satisfies them both. Enter the librarian.
She asks one why he wants the window open: “To get some fresh
air.” She asks the other why he wants it closed: “To avoid the draft.”
After thinking a minute, she opens wide a window in the next room,
bringing in fresh air without a draft.40
The key to this example is that the two men were arguing about
their positions (whether the window should be open or closed), which
were incompatible, rather than about their interests (the needs and
wishes underlying those positions). The librarian, rather than siding
with one of the two positions, instead tried to find a way to satisfy