Women Don't Ask Read online

  the market will pay for their skills and time can help override their

  inaccurate sense of self-worth. But situations like these are rare. More

  common are situations in which information about prevailing salary

  rates is not readily available—situations in which women’s low sense

  of entitlement makes them most vulnerable to unfair treatment (or sim-

  ply to the natural tendency of the market to reward people no more

  than they require).

  One of Linda’s studies confirms that ambiguous negotiating situa-

  tions, in which comparison information is hard to come by, can pro-

  duce big gender differences in outcomes. Using data collected by the

  career services department of an Ivy League business school, Linda and

  two colleagues, Hannah Riley and Kathleen McGinn, both negotiation

  experts at Harvard, found that the women’s starting salaries for their

  first jobs after graduation were 6 percent lower on average than the

  men’s—even adjusting for the industries they entered, their pre-MBA

  salaries, their functional areas, and the cities in which their jobs were

  located.46 This is a pretty big difference. But even more striking was that

  the guaranteed yearly bonuses negotiated by the women were 19 percent

  smaller than those obtained by the men (again, taking into account sig-59

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  nificant differentiating factors). When Hannah Riley discussed these

  findings with the career services counselors at the school, an interesting

  detail emerged: Reliable guidelines about starting salary ranges exist for

  many industries and jobs, but few guidelines exist for standard bonus

  amounts.

  These results suggest that bonus negotiations represent a more am-

  biguous situation in which women’s impaired sense of entitlement

  makes them more likely to price themselves too low. They also suggest

  ways for women to reduce their vulnerability in these ambiguous situa-

  tions—by tracking down the information they need for themselves.

  How can this be done? The first step involves tapping one’s networks—

  both personal and professional connections—to find out as much as

  possible about what people in similar positions earn and about the titles

  or job grades, office assignments, levels of administrative support,

  workloads, travel requirements, bonuses, vacation time, and benefits

  that go along with those positions. In a hiring or promotion situation,

  this type of information can become a valuable resource. Someone who

  wants more vacation time to spend with her kids might offer to trade

  her bonus for an extra two weeks off, for example. Someone else who

  wants more administrative support might offer to do more traveling.

  The first step in doing this kind of research is to make sure to collect

  information from both women and men. The second step is to col-

  lect information from outside sources that compile salary ranges for

  particular jobs, such as Internet sites, trade journals, and career counsel-

  ing offices at colleges, universities, and professional schools. Web

  sites that contain information about salary ranges for particular jobs

  include www.salary.com, www.careerjournal.com, www.jobstar.org,

  and http://content.monster.com/. Detailed information about salaries in various types of businesses and lines of both public- and private-sector

  work can often be found on industry- or sector-specific sites as well.

  These resources can provide women with hard data to back up their

  requests—and give them a concrete idea of their market power.

  Gillian, 52, a rehabilitation counselor, had been working on a con-

  tract basis at a large hospital for 12 years. She put in a lot of hours, but

  because hers was not a permanent position, she was paid by the hour

  and paid poorly—only $16.37 an hour, despite 29 years’ experience in

  her field. When the hospital finally offered her a full-time position, she

  wasn’t sure whether she could also request a higher salary or she should

  just be grateful to have the security of a permanent job. Her friends

  told her that she should definitely ask for more money, but she was so

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  uncertain that one of her friends, a colleague of Linda’s, suggested that

  she talk to Linda. Linda told her that her hourly wage was very low and

  that full-time hourly wages tend to be much higher than those paid to

  part-timers. Linda encouraged Gillian to research the salaries paid to

  other people doing comparable work (both men and women), and Gil-

  lian discovered that these ranged from $20 to $25 an hour. Encouraged

  by Linda and her other friends, and with this data in hand, Gillian asked

  for 23 dollars an hour and got it—a raise of 41 percent. This is a perfect

  example of how much more women can get for themselves when they

  question their low sense of entitlement, research appropriate goals, and

  get the kinds of support they need to ask for what they deserve.

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  3

  Nice Girls Don’t Ask

  Theresearchwepresentedinthelastchaptersuggeststhatwomen’s

  low sense of personal entitlement—uncertainty about what their

  work is worth or how much they deserve to get for what they do—

  often deters them from asking for more than they already have. But

  what causes this depressed sense of entitlement? Why does the average

  woman have more trouble than the average man believing that she de-

  serves more than she’s been given? And why is she less comfortable

  asking for changes that would improve her working conditions, en-

  hance her job satisfaction, or help her run her household more effi-

  ciently? In this chapter, we draw on research in sociology and psychol-

  ogy to explore the roots of this problem. We look at the ways in which

  we as a society school children in gender-appropriate behavior and

  pressure adults to abide by conventional notions of how women and

  men should behave.

  Society’s Messages

  We as a society take it for granted that men and women usually behave

  differently and exhibit different types of traits—this has been well docu-

  mented.1 Men are thought to be assertive, dominant, decisive, ambi-

  tious, and self-oriented, whereas women are thought to be warm, ex-

  pressive, nurturing, emotional, and friendly.2 These are gender

  stereotypes, and in every branch of the social sciences, from psychology

  and sociology to organizational behavior and linguistics, researchers

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  have shown that they hold sway over people’s perceptions.3 Because

  gender is a physical characteristic and immediately apparent, we all

  draw a wide range of conclusions about the people we meet—as soon

  as we meet them—based on their gender.

  Ideas about gender roles go even further. Not merely beliefs about

  what men and women are like, these shared ideas represent our expec-

  tations for how men and women will behave. For example, it’s widely

  believed that women tend to be “communal,” or less concerned with

  their own needs and more focused on the welfare of others. Men, inr />
  contrast, are thought to be “agentic,” an awkward term that means fo-

  cused on their own aims and interests and more likely to act indepen-

  dent of others’ needs or desires.4 In common language, women are

  thought to be more “other-oriented” and men are thought to be more

  “self-oriented.”

  The pressure to put the needs of others first manifests itself in a

  variety of ways in women’s lives. Lory, the theater production manager,

  summed up her other-directed approach to life in this way: “If it’s some-

  thing that’s just for me, only for me, then I go back to, ‘do I really need

  it?’ More, it’s really, ‘how does it affect people around me?’ ” Describing

  her job, in which she manages the production staffs of three shows in

  three cities, she said, “really, my needs are group needs. . . . Which

  actually fits pretty well into my regular life, too, because I’m not usually

  too concerned about me. You know, I’m much more outward. I think

  the purpose in life is to make things nice for everybody.” Lory’s attitude

  is especially noteworthy because she’s not a 70-year-old grandmother

  who came of age in the 1950s. She’s young and self-confident, she

  works in a competitive and demanding field, and she’s very successful.

  In a completely different professional realm, Ada, a lawyer in her

  early fifties with a distinguished career as a litigator behind her, now

  serves as inspector general of a high-profile government agency. And

  like Lory, Ada is extremely successful and outwardly self-confident. But,

  although she has no trouble asking for things on behalf of her clients,

  her employees, or her children, she said, “I find it really hard to ask for

  things for myself.” Comfortable being aggressive and capable in her

  “communal” role, when she is working on behalf of others, she pulls

  up short when she needs to ask for something on her own behalf.

  Of course, no one is completely “other-oriented” or “self-oriented”;

  we all possess both of these qualities to varying degrees. But many stud-

  ies have shown that as a society we expect women to be more oriented

  toward the needs of others and men to be more oriented toward their

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  own needs and ambitions. And this is where problems arise, because

  the ideas we share about gender roles are also normative—they involve

  qualities and behaviors that we believe men and women should have.

  So a man who is not especially ambitious risks being called a “wimp”

  or a “loser.” And an assertive, ambitious woman runs head-on into soci-

  ety’s requirement that she be selfless and communal. Wanting things

  for oneself and doing whatever may be necessary to get those things—

  such as asking for them—often clashes with the social expectation that

  a woman will devote her attention to the needs of others and pay less

  attention to her own.5

  In addition to holding strong ideas about how men and women

  should feel and behave, we as a society feel confident that everyone else

  shares these ideas—an assumption that usually turns out to be true. In

  the “pay allocation” studies by Major, McFarlin, and Gagnon described

  in the last chapter, for example, both men and women predicted that

  men would pay themselves more than women. In the “time worked”

  studies, both men and women predicted that women would work

  longer than men for the same pay. This tells us that both sexes recognize

  women’s lower feelings of entitlement and assume they will play out

  in predictable ways: leading women to expect smaller rewards for

  the work they do and motivating them to work harder for the rewards

  they get.6

  Evidence that women are conditioned not to get what they want can

  be seen all around us in popular culture. Women’s magazines exhort

  women month after month to believe that they’re entitled to happiness,

  self-confidence, and success. (Here are a few cover lines from 2001

  and 2002 issues of Oprah Winfrey’s magazine, O: “Self-Esteem: The ‘O’

  Guide to Getting It”; “Dream Big”; “Success: Define It for Yourself.”) O

  and magazines like it publish articles like this precisely because they

  know that women struggle with entitlement and self-esteem issues—

  and that offering to help women with these issues sells magazines.

  Even something as seemingly basic as sexual satisfaction seems sub-

  ject to this differential analysis. Studies reporting the percentage of time

  women reach or fail to reach orgasm are a staple in women’s magazines,

  but similar studies of men rarely if ever appear. This suggests both that

  the importance of sexual fulfillment for men is generally understood

  and that we take for granted that women will not have their needs met

  in this most basic area of life a surprisingly large percentage of the time.

  It may also suggest that during intimate relations, as in other parts of

  their lives, women tend to fulfill their expected gender role and focus

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  on the needs of their partners while men, trained to be “self-oriented,”

  are more likely to focus on their own needs.

  We don’t mean to suggest that men don’t also struggle with self-

  esteem and entitlement issues, of course, but whether they struggle to

  a much lesser degree or they worry that it’s unmanly to admit how much

  they struggle, men’s magazines do not hawk many articles designed to

  bolster men’s self-esteem. And given how much more likely men are to

  ask for the things they want and need, it’s clear that entitlement issues

  don’t constrain men in the same ways that they constrain women.

  The Origins of Norms

  Where do these ideas about appropriate and “natural” behaviors come

  from? In the early years of our social development as a species, research-

  ers suspect, biological factors first pushed men and women toward dif-

  ferent roles. Women’s ability to bear and nurse children gave them clear

  advantages in the domestic realm while men’s superior strength gave

  them work advantages. So for hundreds of thousands of years, women

  took care of the children and the housework while men felled trees to

  build houses, hunted for food, protected their families (even going off

  to war), and devoted themselves to other tasks that involved physical

  strength.7 Once scientific and technological advances eased the pressure

  of these biological factors, the influence of cultural tradition kicked in—

  men and women continued to play the historical roles they’d always

  played because this allocation of roles, being familiar, seemed correct

  and appropriate. As a result, even today, “domestic” roles (in the home)

  are still filled overwhelmingly by women and “employee” roles are still

  filled more by men (although women have made substantial gains in

  this realm).8

  At work, the different jobs men and women typically perform also

  perpetuate traditional ideas about gender roles. As recently as 2001, 98

  percent of child-care workers, 82 percent of elementary school teachers,


  91 percent of nurses, 99 percent of secretaries, and 70 percent of social

  workers in the United States were women. In the same year in the

  United States, 87.5 percent of the corporate officers of the 500 largest

  companies, 90 percent of all engineers, 98 percent of all construction

  workers, and 70 percent of all financial managers were men.9 In addi-

  tion to perpetuating old notions about what constitutes “women’s work”

  and “men’s work,” this heavy identification of certain jobs with one

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  gender or the other also suggests that it takes stereotypically “male” or

  “female” qualities to succeed in those occupations. A 1999 study by the

  social psychologists Mary Ann Cejka and Alice Eagly proved this point

  by asking college students to rate the attributes necessary to succeed in

  various occupations. For occupations more heavily dominated (numeri-

  cally) by men, students felt that male physical qualities (such as being

  athletic and tall) and masculine personality characteristics (such as

  being competitive and daring) were important for success in those occu-

  pations. For occupations more heavily dominated (numerically) by

  women, students felt that female physical qualities (such as being

  pretty and having a soft voice) and female personality characteristics

  (such as being nurturing and supportive) were important for success in

  those jobs.10

  The steady inroads women have made into male-dominated occupa-

  tions in recent years might give us the impression that strict job segrega-

  tion by gender and the ideas this segregation perpetuates have become

  things of the past. The percentages of men and women in different

  professions noted above were drawn from 2001 data, however, and

  Cejka and Eagly’s study was completed in 1999. Another study from

  the 1990s calculated that for women and men to be equally distributed

  into similar types of jobs, 77 percent of the women working today

  would need to change jobs.11 In other words, for a long time to come,

  the jobs that men and women typically do will continue to teach us

  lessons about the jobs men and women “should” do.

  There’s another dimension to this problem: Western society’s histori-

  cal habit of “assigning” men and women to certain types of work can