Punished for negotiating?

March 14, 2014

One of the themes I keep coming back to in life and in my work as a journalist is women and negotiation. I find negotiating for more money quite uncomfortable, and so do nearly all my friends. I recommend the book Ask For It to any woman who will listen. So I was fascinated to read this piece on the website Inside Higher Ed about a recent (female) PhD graduate who tried to negotiate a job offer at Nazareth College in upstate New York. The college didn’t want to negotiate. And it went one step further – it rescinded the offer altogether.

Linda Babcock, co-author of Ask For It

Here’s a quick summation of the story (I strongly urge you to read the whole piece on Inside Higher Ed). The woman, who is anonymous, wrote to the college, beginning with the line, “As you know, I am very enthusiastic about the possibility of coming to Nazareth. Granting some of the following provisions would make my decision easier." She then went on to list them. They included an increase in her starting salary (to $65,000) and maternity leave, among others. She ended the email with, “I know that some of these might be easier to grant than others. Let me know what you think.”

The college wrote back saying it thought she was better suited to a research university, and added it was withdrawing its job offer.

The piece has been picked up by multiple blogs and sites including Jezebel (where as you might expect, large helpings of snark are added). But Jezebel makes a good point: this is the exact reaction women fear when they negotiate, or even think about negotiating, and it's why a lot of women don't negotiate at all. Would this same thing have happened to a man?

I just called Linda Babcock to talk about this. Linda is the co-author, with Sara Laschever, of Ask For It. Unless you consider yourself a brilliant negotiator, you should order a copy now – it truly will change your way of thinking about this stuff. She is also an economics professor at the Heinz School at Carnegie Mellon Unvieristy in Pittsburgh, and the author of several much-cited studies on women, men, and negotiation. 

“I hate it when my research is right,” she told me. She knows from her work that women receive backlash when they try to negotiate, particularly if they negotiate in an up-front way, as this newly minted academic did. Hiring managers do not like it when a woman comes across as demanding. That behavior flouts expectations of how women are meant to conduct themselves, and can elicit strong negative reactions.

“We can’t prove it wouldn't have happened to a man, but it’s just awfully suspect,” says Linda.

But a listener of mine, a female academic who doesn't want her name used, thinks differently.

“I don't think that was a clear case of sexism,” she says. “I would never try to do that kind of negotiation in e-mail, as when done that way, it looks like a huge list of demands.” She also thought the list of requests showed a mismatch between the candidate's expectations and the reality of academic life. 

“I also think [the requests] probably really rubbed the department the wrong way," she goes on, "because most faculty who have been teaching for a while would have done so without any of those benefits, they may already be feeling like the new hire is being brought in way above their own salaries (at that stage in their careers), and it can breed immediate resentment.” That said, this listener adds that she feels the hiring committee’s response was “completely inappropriate”.

Linda Babcock says even if the faculty at Nazareth College regarded this woman’s requests as over-the-top, couldn’t they have called her to disucss them rather than withdraw the job offer? My two cents: I believe the woman made a mistake in not calling the college to talk over the offer, and sending an email instead, because the email certainly reads as rather abrupt. Linda agrees. “We want women to use a very relational, friendly approach, and it’s hard to do that in an email. The email comes off as very cold, direct, impersonal, and that is not the way people like women to negotiate." 

All the research shows women have to be extremely careful in the way they ask for more. Societal expectations are that women are ‘nice', accommodating creatures. People - men and women - don’t like it when we act any other way. This may be a case where a female candidate came across as too uppity for the faculty's liking, and was punished for it.

Feel free to share your thoughts on this below. Do you think a man writing such a blunt email would have been rejected in the same way?  

Women, identity, and valuing ourselves

October 28, 2013

Britain's new ten pound note, featuring Jane Austen

The other week I wrote a post I called When Women Work For Free. It was inspired by Tess Vigeland's post Me, Work For Free At This Point In My Career? and today I was alerted to this New York Times piece by Tim Kreider (for which he was actually paid), Slaves of the Internet, Unite! I'm going off on a slight tangent here, especially as Kreider, obviously, is male, and yet has himself agreed to work for nothing on what sounds like multiple occasions. But the way women value themselves - and how their sense of identity messes with their ability to get more money - played into a talk I attended last week at a conference put on by Working Mother Media. Columbia Business School professor Michael Morris talked about his, and former student, Emily Amanatullah's, research into women and negotiating. I'm slightly obsessed with this topic, as some of you may know. I've reported two stories on negotiating for Marketplace in the past, and episode 13 of The Broad Experience was about what happens when women ask women for a raise. I'm always banging on about the bookAsk For It, which I recommend to any woman who'll listen.

Morris presented us with a graph showing that when women in the Columbia experiment had to negotiate for themselves, they lowballed themselves. As a result, they ended up with a far lower salary offer than the men in the experiment, who, after receiving a relatively low offer, countered with a much higher one, and got something in the middle. He said the women were notably "much less assertive" and that this is because "they anticipate a backlash" from the interviewer. They're trying to manage society's expectations for their behavior, he said. We all know what he's talking about: that idea that you have to be nice at all times and if you're not, you'll suffer for it. Sadly, other experiments have borne this out. Both male and female interviewers do view women with distaste when they negotiate aggressively. When men do so, neither sex bats an eyelid (read Ask For It to find out more).

(I should say here that I approached Morris after the talk and he doesn't seem to agree with me that part of the issue for women when negotiating for ourselves is that many women just don't think we deserve things, period. Maybe it would take a different experiment to prove that theory.)

But women aren't hampered by some innate inability to negotiate. Morris and Amanatullah found that when women are charged with negotiating on behalf of someone else, there's no difference in what they manage to get. Men and women, in other words, when negotiating for another person, aim high and get the same amount. What stymies women is juggling their sense of self and society's view of them with securing more money for themselves. These elements are at odds with one another. Morris went on to talk about women's sense of identity, and how that plays out in the workplace. I'll quote him: "People whose 'woman' identity was well integrated...they were more likely to negotiate better and be warm." Basically, it all comes down to your company culture, which, as we know, tends to default to 'male'. Morris says if you're a woman who feels comfortable in your corporate setting, you're more likely to be yourself, and thus do a better job of negotiating for yourself, than if you're having to put on a mask every day to go to work. 

"Shape an organizational culture so your employees don't feel they have to check their identity at the door," said Morris. "They can then negotiate better. Life is more comfortable when you have an integrated identity." 

Quite.