Good morning.
There’s a persistent perception that men negotiate their salaries more than women, which contributes to the pay gap. But new research may crush that theory.
“I have been studying and teaching negotiations for over 20 years,” Laura Kray, a professor at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, tells me. “In my experience, women are just as effective in negotiating as men, yet the belief that women are inferior negotiators is so sticky, even among women.”
Kray, an expert on gender in the workplace, is a coauthor of the paper, “Now, Women Do Ask: A Call to Update Beliefs about the Gender Pay Gap,” published this month in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries. Her previous research has shown that women negotiators are “more likely to be deceived than men negotiators, suggesting it is important to examine gender differences in treatment,” Kray explains. "I decided to look at negotiating propensity and negotiating treatment,” she says.
The researchers completed several studies. First, they explored people’s perceptions about the negotiating behavior of women and men, in general. They surveyed a nationally representative sample of the U.S. adult population. The majority of participants believed that women negotiate their salaries less than men do. The results indicate acceptance of the “women don’t ask” stereotype, suggesting this belief is widely accepted throughout American society, according to the researchers.
They then examined the actual negotiation propensity of women and men who hold MBA degrees. Participants included 990 MBA students (596 men and 394 women) graduating between the years of 2015 and 2019. The results: more women (54%) than men (44%) reported negotiating their job offers.
Next, the researchers examined an online survey conducted in 2019 of 1,939 alumni who graduated with an MBA from a prestigious U.S. business school (not named). They found evidence that women attempted to negotiate more than men. However, the “gender gap in compensation in this MBA population remained, with women earning less than men," according to the report.
Why did the researchers decide to focus on those who earned MBA degrees? “The gender pay gap is largest at the higher end of the income distribution,” Kray says. (That said, it's also possible that women with MBAs might be especially inclined to negotiate, given that it's usually part of a b-school education.)
A recent Pew Research Center analysis explains that over the past 20 years, the gender gap has "barely closed in the United States." And college-educated women are “no closer to wage parity with their male counterparts than other women,” according to Pew. For example, in 2022, women with at least a bachelor’s degree, on average, earned 79% as much as men who were college graduates, the report states.
Kray and her coauthors concluded from their research: “Given women’s greater, not lesser, tendency to ask, a gender difference in negotiation propensity cannot account for the gender pay gap found in these alumni data, wherein women earned less, not more than men.”
'It is hard to get people to update their beliefs'
Another step the researchers took was to review self-reported negotiation initiation data from nine prior studies published from 1982 to 2015. In the early era, men reported a greater propensity to negotiate than women. However, the gender difference may have “disappeared around 1994 and then reversed beginning around 2007, and this trend appears to have continued growing since then,” according to the report.
So, regarding salary negotiations within the past two decades, women do ask—now, potentially at a rate even greater than men, the researchers conclude.
Why does Kray think the stereotype about women and pay negotiation continues? “It is hard to get people to update their beliefs,” Kray says. “We draw from theories of motivated reasoning,” she explains. For example, believing that the pay gap exists because women don't negotiate “satisfies the need to believe that the world we live in is fair and just and preserves the status quo,” she says.
The belief that women don’t ask reinforces stereotypes that “women are less competitive and ambitious than men, and strengthens explanations for the pay gap that point to women's choices as opposed to structural barriers,” Kray says.
Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com
