November 24, 2024
A brand-new study by researchers at Columbia Business School shows that women executives now negotiate more and better than men! It’s a bit counter-intuitive, and well worth talking about.
The end of “women don’t ask”?
In 2007, economics professor Linda Babcock published the book Women don’t ask. For her, it was clear: if women earned less than men, it was also because they didn’t negotiate their salaries! At the time, she estimated that the loss of earnings attributable to the fear of asking (linked to the fear of being turned down), to a lack ofassertiveness and even to women’s unfortunate tendency to shoot themselves in the foot, amounted to $500,000 over a professional lifetime.
Babcock’s work has had the salutary effect of energizing the conversation about the importance of negotiation in everyone’s career path. for everyone, countering the temptation for some women with a Cinderella complex to wait for their needs to be understood and met, rather than expressing them.
But this approach has also been criticized. Research has shown that when women negotiate, they are less likely than men to win, because their assertiveness is not matched by gender stereotypes. Thus, the “women don’t ask” approach was suspected of making women feel guilty for something for which they were not responsible. Other research was quick to point out that, although women entered the job market less accustomed to negotiating because they were still lulled by the “good girl” complex, the differences in negotiating ability smoothed out over time, and that after a decade or so of experience, and provided they felt they were in an environment that inspired confidence, women and men showed equivalent reflexes when it came to discussing pay with employers. And while they negotiated less when they were hired, they negotiated just as much when it came to pay rises.
The codes of negotiation in question
The opening of this debate also had the effect of questioning the codes of negotiation. Could these codes be described as masculine, and thus men implicitly favored in a context of enduring patriarchy?
This part of the discussion led toa series of welcome clarifications on the distinction between negotiation and power struggle, negotiation and bargaining (or even blackmail), negotiation and manipulation… This enabled the dissemination of a real pedagogy of negotiation as a fertile relational process ( integrative negotiation) in which parties with different but compatible interests and potentially a common interest base co-construct reasoned and sustainable solutions.
A real change of perspective: in the ordinary imagination, we used to see negotiation as an arm-wrestling contest calling for boldness, toughness and a competitive spirit, and now we’re finally able to see it also as an object of dialogue calling for qualities such as listening, empathy and creativity.
Women’s advantage?
The study conducted by Rebecca Ponce de Leon and her colleagues at Columbia Business School, published in November 2024, may well suggest that the understanding of negotiation codes is changing.
These studies show that women do indeed ask for less than men, and the study’s authors confirm that women still face a lower social admissibility of financial demands for themselves. In other words, when they ask for a lot, they reduce their chances of getting it, whereas men increase them. When they ask for “too much”, they risk paying a higher price than men in the same situation: Ponce de Leon even talks of a “backlash” in terms of relationships and trust inspired if they have to come across as excessively demanding during a failed negotiation. As a result, the study confirms that women unconsciously integrate a strategy of moderate demand.
But they haven’t said their last word. Columbia academics have compared the positions of women and men in two different negotiation situations: a “weak alternative” situation (the employer’s proposal is take it or leave it, you can leave if you don’t like it) and a “strong alternative” situation (the employer can’t offer a raise on the requested position, but offers another job whose remuneration can be discussed). Men and women perform equally well in the strong alternative. On the weak alternative, however, women outperform men! They are half as likely as men to reach an impasse. And they show a greater ability to achieve little, but always better than nothing.
Breaking down stereotypes
It’s a proven fact: women negotiate just as well as men, and have equivalent, if not superior, negotiating skills. Despite this, the idea that women don’t negotiate is still firmly entrenched in people’s minds. In a 2023 study, researchers at Vanderbilt University found that 64% of men and 47% of women still believe that women don’t negotiate their salaries, whereas in reality 54% of women and 44% of men do in fact negotiate their salaries with their employers. In other words, whatever common sense may think, you’re more likely to find a woman negotiating her salary than a man in the same situation!
For Jessica Kennedy, the study’s rapporteur, it’s urgent to deconstruct the idea that wage inequalities stem from this gendered gap in negotiating skills and aptitudes. Firstly, because it’s a misconception, of course, but also because this stereotype of the woman who doesn’t dare negotiate is deleterious. It harms women by delaying the social admissibility of their self-advocacy practices. . Tant qu’il sera considéré comme surprenant et non comme banal qu’une femme négocie, l’acte de négocier sera vécu comme périlleux par un certain nombre de femmes. De plus, selon Kennedy, entretenir la croyance selon laquelle le problème des inégalités salariales proviendrait d’un « manque » (de confiance en soi, d’assertivité, d’audace…) chez les femmes, c’est risquer de passer à côté de toute une série de facteurs systémiques auxquels il faudra bien se confronter si l’on veut vraiment en finir avec les écarts de rémunération.
In the meantime, let’s not forget that negotiation requires all of us, women and men alike, to strike a fine balance between assertiveness and empathy!
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