Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want

Book by Babcock Linda Laschever Sara

Chapter One
Why you need to ask

IF YOU'RE A WOMAN, you probably have a voice inside your head that whispers:

"Are you sure you're as good as you think you are?"

Or maybe it says:

"Why can't you be happy with what you've got? Don't you have enough already?"

Or perhaps, even though you're very successful, you hear that voice warning:

"Watch out. Don't get pushy. . . ."

This voice probably talks the loudest when you're thinking about asking for something you want—a raise, a better title, more power or responsibility, or even more help around the house. And the odds are, you listen to this voice. You may think it's the voice of experience, or maybe your common sense preventing you from doing something rash. Or perhaps you think you should be grateful for what you've got—you should feel lucky—and not screw things up by reaching for more.

We've written this book to help you talk back to that voice. Because that voice is not the voice of experience and it's not your common sense. It's not even your voice. It's the voice of a society that hasn't progressed nearly as far as we'd like to think, a society that's still trying to tell women how they should and shouldn't behave. It's a voice whose message is conveyed, often unwittingly, by our parents, teachers, colleagues, and friends—and then repeated and amplified by the media and popular culture.

If you have that voice in your head, whoever's voice it is, that voice is holding you back. It's slowing you down, it's damaging your self-esteem, and it's costing you money. By telling you not to ask for the things you want, that voice is cutting you off from dozens—maybe hundreds—of opportunities to improve your life and increase your happiness. It's also preventing you from learning how to negotiate for what you need with skill and confidence. It's preventing you from discovering the ways in which negotiating effectively can be an extraordinary tool for transforming your life.


Women don't ask

We know that this is true—that women don't ask for what they want and need, and suffer severe consequences as a result—because we've spent years studying the phenomenon. In the mid-1990s, Linda was serving as the director of the Ph.D. program at the Heinz School, the graduate school of public policy and management at Carnegie Mellon University, where she teaches. One day a group of female graduate students came to her office. "Why are most of the male students in the program teaching their own courses this fall," the women asked, "while all the female graduate students have been assigned to act as teaching assistants to regular faculty?" Not knowing the answer, Linda took the students' question to the associate dean in charge of making teaching assignments, who happened to be her husband. His reply was straightforward. "I'll try to find teaching opportunities for any student who approaches me with a good idea for a course, the ability to teach, and a reasonable offer about what it will cost," he said. "More men ask. The women just don't ask."

Could he be right? Linda recalled other situations in which a female student had protested because a male student had enjoyed some form of special treatment. One woman told Linda that she assumed she couldn't march in June graduation ceremonies the year she completed her dissertation because she wasn't scheduled to get her degree until August. She asked why Linda had allowed two men to march who also didn't finish until the end of the summer. Another woman asked why Linda had found funding for a male student to attend an important public policy conference and hadn't provided the same opportunity to her. A third woman observed a male student using department facilities to print up business stationery for himself and said she thought it was unfair that other students weren't allowed to do the same. In each case, the men had asked, and Linda, who saw it as a central part of her job to help students in any way she could, happily obliged.

Linda realized with chagrin that she'd been perpetuating discrimination—the last thing she wanted to do—simply by not noticing how much more often men asked for things that would help them get ahead. And the discrimination she'd perpetuated could have far-reaching consequences. Men with teaching experience would have meatier resumes and appear better qualified when they entered the job market than women who did not. The man who attended the public policy conference made valuable contacts that could be useful later in his career, and the woman who couldn't afford to go had missed out. The man who printed up his own stationery was able to present himself as a more polished and professional job candidate than the women who had not.

The social scientist in Linda perked up. She'd spent ten years teaching negotiation to students, salespeople, business executives, scientists, physicians, lawyers, and women's leadership groups. Did this difference in the rate of asking between her male and female students indicate that women weren't using negotiation to promote their careers as much as they could be? Was this a problem that contributed to the unequal treatment of women throughout their adult lives?

Linda turned to the existing research about gender differences in negotiation to find out. What she discovered surprised her: This large body of research looked almost exclusively at how men and women behave when they're negotiating. No one had taken a step back to look at what motivates people to negotiate in the first place, and—more significantly—whether men and women use negotiation to advance their goals at the same rate.

Eager to learn more, Linda and several colleagues launched a research program to explore these questions. She and her collaborators invited men and women into their research lab, asked them to play carefully designed games, and observed whether they used negotiation to improve their positions. They sent graduate students armed with questionnaires to airports and shopping malls. They designed experiments that explored the emotions people associate with negotiation. They created a huge Web survey to poll people of every age and economic group, from the lowest-skilled to the highest-paid professionals, about their attitudes toward negotiation. This survey asked participants about how and when they used negotiation and about the types of situations in which they felt they could negotiate. The bottom line: In every study, Linda's team found clear and consistent evidence that men initiate negotiations to advance their own interests about four times as frequently as women do.


The cost of not asking

Does this difference matter? Does the relative infrequency with which women assert what they want actually cost women, and if so, what are the costs? Since the wage differential between men and women still hovers around 77 percent—meaning women on average earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man—Linda decided to look first at salaries. What she found shocked her: Not negotiating their salaries, it turns out, can be outrageously expensive for women. Here are a few examples of how costly it can be.

At twenty-two, just out of college, you and a twenty-two-year-old man with the same qualifications are offered the same job for the same salary: $25,000. You accept the $25,000 while the man negotiates and raises his starting salary to $30,000. The man deposits the extra $5,000 in a low-earning account, an account that grows about 3 percent every year. Throughout your working lives, the two of you both average 3 percent annual salary increases but of course your salary can't keep pace with his because he started out higher. Every year, the man takes the difference between what he would have earned if he'd accepted the $25,000 (what you're earning) and what he's actually earning because he negotiated for more, and he adds that amount to the same low-yield account he opened when he was twenty-two. By the time he's ready to retire at sixty-five, that account contains $784,192—over three-quarters of a million dollars accumulated simply because he negotiated that one time. That's over three-quarters of a million dollars you don't have because you didn't negotiate. If the man puts the money in an account earning 5 or 6 percent, his gains would be even higher.

At thirty, having just completed your MBA, you and a male peer receive job offers for $100,000. You take the $100,000—that's a lot of money, after all—but the man negotiates and gets his offer raised to $115,000. You both average 3 percent raises every year; he invests his extra money in an account earning 3 percent, and by the time you both reach sixty-five he's saved $1,519,486 (over $1.5 million) more than you have.

You're forty, you're not in a high-flying profession, and you've already reached the middle of your career. You know you've been chronically underpaid by market standards but you assume it's too late to do anything about it. You and a male colleague in the same position both launch a job search. You each receive offers for $70,000 a year, which you know is at the low end of the range for someone with your training and experience. Nevertheless, you accept the $70,000 your male colleague negotiates to correct this imbalance and gets the offer raised to $77,000. Every year until he retires, he invests the extra amount in a low-yield account and accumulates $381,067 more by the time you both reach sixty-five—a nice addition to his retirement nest egg.

Those sums are high enough in themselves. When you add in other forms of compensation that are often tied to salary, such as bonuses, stock options, severance packages, and pension benefits (all of which women are also less likely to negotiate), the financial losses a woman can suffer from not negotiating become truly staggering.

But what if, like many of us, you don't measur...