different salary histories are rated differently by employers. If your
compensation record is better than others, employers will assume
that your performance is better too. . . . Accepting less will imply
that you have less value than other new hires.16
In many cases, employers actually respect candidates more for push-
ing to get paid what they’re worth. This means that women don’t merely
sacrifice additional income when they don’t push to be paid more, they
may sacrifice some of their employers’ regard too. The experience of
Hope, a business school professor, tells this story clearly. When she
completed graduate school, Hope was offered a job at a prestigious
management consulting firm. Not wanting to “start off on the wrong
foot,” she accepted the firm’s initial salary offer without asking for more.
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Although she feared that negotiating her salary would damage her new
bosses’ impression of her, the opposite occurred: She later learned that
her failure to negotiate almost convinced the senior management team
that they’d made a mistake in hiring her.
Similarly, Ellen, 44, a senior partner at a large law firm, was checking
the references of an experienced paralegal named Lucy whom she
wanted to hire. One of Lucy’s former supervisors described a long list
of Lucy’s strengths and recommended her highly. But when Ellen asked
about Lucy’s weaknesses, the supervisor said that Lucy could be more
assertive. Ellen asked if she meant Lucy needed to be more assertive on
behalf of the firm’s clients. The supervisor said no, Lucy was terrific at
tracking down any information that could benefit a client’s case. What
she meant, the supervisor explained, was that Lucy needed to be more
assertive on her own behalf. “She could be a lot more assertive when it
comes to her own professional needs and rewards,” the woman ex-
plained. This supervisor felt that not asking for more on her own behalf
was a professional weakness in Lucy—and a serious enough weakness
that she mentioned it when providing an otherwise glowing reference.
Women also make sacrifices in their personal lives by not asking for
what they need more of the time. Miriam, 46, an architect, is also mar-
ried to an architect. But whereas her husband works for an internation-
ally known firm and travels regularly for his job, Miriam works for
herself. And because they have two children, she restricts herself to
residential projects in her home state. When her children were small,
her husband was out of town two to five days a week, and she was
taking care of the children pretty much by herself. Although she en-
joyed a lot of artistic freedom in her work and built up a successful
practice constructing two- and three-million-dollar houses (houses that
won awards and were featured in design magazines), the demands of
her family life felt crushing. “I just felt like this is the way that life is for me and there is not anything that I can do about this.” Now she wonders
“if there would have been ways of asking for more help” instead of
“working and working until I fell apart.” The problem was that “asking
didn’t really seem like a possibility, but I’m sure that it was.”
Missing the Chance
Besides not realizing that asking is possible, many women avoid negoti-
ating even in situations in which they know that negotiation is appro-
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I N T R O D U C T I O N
priate and expected (like the female students in the starting salary
study). In another one of Linda’s studies, 20 percent of the women
polled said that they never negotiate at all.17 Although this seems un-
likely (perhaps these women think of their negotiations as something
else, such as “problem-solving” or “compromising” or even “going along
to get along”), their statement conveys a strong antipathy toward negoti-
ating among a huge number of women. (In the United States alone, 20
percent of the female adult population equals 22 million people.)
That many women feel uncomfortable using negotiation to advance
their interests—and feel more uncomfortable on average than men—
survey asked respondents to consider various scenarios and indicate
whether they thought negotiation would be appropriate in the situa-
tions described. In situations in which they thought negotiation was
appropriate, respondents were also asked to report how likely they
would be to negotiate in that situation. Particularly around work scenar-
ios, such as thinking they were due for a promotion or a salary increase,
women as a group were less likely to try to negotiate than men—even
though they recognized that negotiation was appropriate and probably
even necessary.18
These findings are momentous because until now research on negoti-
ation has mostly ignored the issue of when and why people attempt to
negotiate, focusing instead on tactics that are successful once a negotia-
tion is underway—what kinds of offers to make, when to concede, and
which strategies are most effective in different types of negotiations.19
With few exceptions, researchers have ignored the crucial fact that the
most important step in any negotiation process must be deciding to
negotiate in the first place.20 Asking for what you want is the essential
first step that “kicks off” a negotiation. If you miss your chance to nego-
tiate, the best negotiation advice in the world isn’t going to help you
much. And women simply aren’t “asking” at the same rate as men.
A New Perspective
Our goal in this book is to explore the causes of this difference between
men and women, using “asking” as a lens through which to examine
how women negotiate life in the broadest sense. In the following pages,
we will examine why many women often don’t realize that change is
possible—why they don’t know that they can ask. We will look at the
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W O M E N D O N ’ T A S K
social forces that school women, from the time they are very young, to
focus on the needs of others rather than on their own needs. And we will
show how our shared assumptions, as a society, about what constitutes
appropriate female behavior can act as a kind of psychological strait-
jacket when a woman wants to assert her own wishes and desires.
Despite recent gains made by women in many realms and the com-
parative openness of Western democracies to progress, our society still
perpetuates rigid gender-based standards for behavior—standards that
require women to behave modestly and unselfishly and to avoid pro-
moting their own self-interest. New generations of children are taught
to abide by and internalize these standards, making them less likely as
adults to rebel against these common beliefs. In addition, women who
do rebel against these standards by pushing more overtly on their own
behalf often risk being punished. Sometimes they’re called “pushy” or
“bitchy” or “
difficult to work with.” Sometimes their skills and contribu-
tions are undervalued and they’re passed over for promotions they de-
serve. Other times, they’re left out of information-sharing networks.
Experiencing this treatment themselves or seeing other women treated
this way, many women struggle with intense anxiety when they con-
sider asking for something they want—anxiety that can deter them from
asking at all or interfere with their ability to ask well.
In addition, even when women do negotiate, they often get less than
a man in the same situation might get. Sometimes this happens because
women set less aggressive goals going into their negotiations than men
set and sometimes it happens because both men and women in our
society typically take a harder line against women than they take against
men in a negotiation. They make worse first offers to women, pressure
women to concede more, and themselves concede much less. This
doesn’t simply limit the results women produce when they do negotiate.
If the benefits from negotiating are likely to be small and the process
promises to be difficult, many women feel less incentive to ask in the
first place.
By exposing the social forces that constrain women from promoting
their own interests and limit them from getting more when they try, we
hope to make it easier for women to do things differently. We’re con-
vinced that for behavior to change women must understand, at a very
deep level, the forces that shape their beliefs, attitudes, and impulses.
Simply telling women what they should do differently without helping
them understand the root causes of their behavior will make women
feel anxious and inadequate, we suspect, but won’t help them achieve
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meaningful change. So in the pages that follow we explore the many
causes and ramifications of this newly recognized problem.
Working from this foundation, we also describe in every chapter
ways in which women can resist and even retool their early social train-
ing, reframe their interactions with others, and overcome the low sense
of entitlement, fear, or extreme caution that can keep them from taking
full advantage of their talents. We don’t mean to imply that this problem
has a simple solution, however—that women just need to wake up and
ask for things more of the time and the problem will go away. Women
tend to hesitate before asking for what they want not because of a silly
blind spot that’s entirely their own responsibility but because they are
taught early on that pushing on their own behalf is unfeminine, unat-
tractive, and unwelcome—not to mention ineffective.
So we want to be clear: This book is not simply a study of an inexpli-
cable female failing that can easily be corrected. It is not about ways in
which women need to “fix” themselves. It is an examination of how our
culture—modern Western culture—strongly discourages women from
asking for what they want. (The situations of women in other parts of
the world bear many similarities to those of women in the West, but
they’re beyond the scope of this book). We hope it will help individual
women improve their circumstances and increase their happiness. But
even more, we hope it will provoke social change on a larger scale by
inspiring everyone—in the workforce and at home—to think differently
about how women can and should behave. To this end, we also include
suggestions for how managers in the workplace and adults both at work
and at home can change their behavior toward the women around
them. Until society accepts that it is a good thing for women to promote
their own interests and negotiate on their own behalf, women will con-
tinue to find it difficult to pursue their dreams and ambitions in
straightforward and effective ways. And we’ll show that preventing
women from doing so involves substantial social and economic costs
for us all.
Affirming the Right to Ask
Can women learn to recognize more hidden opportunities in their cir-
cumstances—and can the world learn to accept women who ask? Can
women overcome their anxiety and find effective ways to negotiate—
and can people stop taking a harder line when they negotiate with
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women? Luckily, the answer to all of these questions is yes. Recognizing
more opportunities for negotiation in your circumstances is a skill that
can be learned—in many cases quite easily. In the three years we spent
writing this book, we discussed our ideas with many women who went
out and applied them in their lives, with dramatic results (many of their
stories appear in the chapters that follow). Research also shows that
certain kinds of training can help women become more effective negoti-
ators (and can substantially decrease their anxiety) by increasing their
sense of control over the negotiation process and teaching them to antic-
ipate roadblocks, plan countermoves, and resist conceding too much or
too soon. Rather than merely imitating men (which often doesn’t work),
women can learn to ask as women. They can find their own “negotiating
voices,” develop more ambitious goals—and get good results.
Society can also change. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book The Tipping
Point, describes how New York City dramatically reduced its crime rate in a very short time by making crime seem less permissible in the streets
of New York. The city did this by cleaning up those streets—eradicating
graffiti, replacing broken windows, removing garbage—and by crack-
ing down on even the most minor crimes, such as fare-jumping in the
subways. Through these seemingly small changes, the city was able to
achieve a profound cultural shift: It was able to change people’s behav-
ior. People with the same deprived backgrounds or bad motives—what-
ever drives people into crime—stopped committing criminal acts sim-
ply because small changes in their environment signaled that such
behavior was no longer appropriate there. As Gladwell writes, “We like
to think of ourselves as autonomous and inner-directed, that who we
are and how we act is something permanently set by our genes and
our temperament.”21 Instead, he shows, “We are actually powerfully
influenced by our surroundings, our immediate context, and the per-
sonalities of those around us.”22
Similarly, changing the context and the cultural environment in
which women live and work can change the behavior of the people who
live and work with them, making certain ways of responding to women
seem less permissible. This type of change can be achieved by a few
people in a group consciously deciding to treat men and women more
equally—and by their example influencing the behavior and beliefs of
others. It can be achieved by men in positions of power making a com-
mitment to mentoring talented women. It can be achieved by a lot of
people paying closer attention to the different ways in which they treat
men and women and raise their male and female childre
n.
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Gladwell calls rapid, large-scale social changes (such as the crime
reduction in New York) social “epidemics.” As The Tipping Point demonstrates, epidemics of social change are rarely the result of a single, uni-
fied effort by millions of people. Because subtle adjustments in their
circumstances can strongly influence people’s beliefs and behavior, even
small changes sometimes have a “multiplier” effect. Or, as Gladwell
writes, “big changes follow from small events.”23 We hope this book will
prompt an epidemic of small changes and lead to a genuine loosening of
the constraints that bind women.
This is not to say that change on a larger scale is not possible as well.
One organization, the international accounting and consulting firm of
Deloitte and Touche, which employs about 29,000 people in the United
States and a total of 95,000 worldwide, has already demonstrated that
with hard work and commitment large-scale cultural change is also
possible. In 1991, Deloitte and Touche decided that it had a problem
concerning women. Only 5 percent of the firm’s partners were women,
and even though it had been hiring large numbers of women since
1980, by 1991 only 8 percent of the new candidates for partner were
female.24 A task force formed to look into the problem discovered that
so few women were coming up for partnerships because most of them
were leaving before they qualified for partner. The average annual turn-
over rate among female managers was huge: 33 percent. The task force
also calculated that every percentage point in turnover translated into
an estimated 13 million dollars for costs such as recruitment, hiring
bonuses, and training. Although the members of the task force assumed
that women were leaving Deloitte and Touche to stay home and have
children, they quickly learned that this was not the case. Women were
not leaving to stay home but were moving to other firms. When polled,
women cited Deloitte and Touche’s male-dominated culture as a big
reason for leaving: The company was just not a comfortable place for
women to work. The task force also found that within the firm, both
men and women wanted the freedom to balance work and family better.
No one wanted what was then the standard 80-hour work week.