A new study authored by three women professors at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government looks at the (very real, still ongoing) gap between men’s and women’s pay, and suggests that negotiation is a major factor in the difference. It’s not necessarily that men are more willing to negotiate salary, or that women don’t know how to do so. Rather, it looks more like women will just choose not to negotiate because they think it will turn around and bite them if they do…and it looks like that’s a valid belief.

The Washington Post reports on the study, which is also recapped in Broadsheet:

Their study, which was coauthored by Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai, found that men and women get very different responses when they initiate negotiations. Although it may well be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found that women’s reluctance was based on an entirely reasonable and accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. Both men and women were more likely to subtly penalize women who asked for more — the perception was that women who asked for more were “less nice”…

(snip)

In this study,…volunteers were asked to decide whether they would hire the candidates — who were all described as exceptionally talented and qualified. While both men and women were penalized for negotiating…the negative effect for women was more than twice as large as that for men.

Subsequent stud(y)…volunteers were again asked whether they would be willing to work with the candidates…Men tended to rule against women who negotiated but were less likely to penalize men; women tended to penalize both men and women who negotiated, and preferred applicants who did not ask for more.

In a final set of studies…volunteers play the role of job candidates and …decide whether to ask for more money than they were offered. Women were less likely than men to negotiate when they believed they would be dealing with a man, but there was no significant difference between men and women when they thought a woman would be making the decision. The applicants, in other words, were accurately reading how males and females were likely to perceive them.

(snip)

(T)he new study showed that women did not act in the same way at all times: They were more likely to negotiate when dealing with another woman than when dealing with a man.

“It is not that women always act one way and men act another way; it tends to be moderated by situational factors,” Bowles said. “The point of this paper is: Yes, there is an economic rationale to negotiate, but you have to weigh that against social risks of negotiating. What we show is those risks are higher for women than for men.”

Diane Danielson mentions the study on the Downtown Women’s Club blog, and HR professional Laurie Ruettimann also mentions it in her blog, remembering the time she was advised to be “more thankful” for a raise when she questioned how it was calculated (after thanking her supervisor, it should be noted).

From my experience, this conclusion makes plenty of sense to me, and not just in an employment context. I’ve negotiated or counteroffered salary just once in my career, and I was terrified that when I did, they’d take the offer back because I wasn’t being cooperative; and I had the same fear when First Husband and I were trying to buy a house – that if we went back and forth too much, the sellers would just decide not to deal with us at all. But we got the house. And in the case of that job, if it weren’t for the fact that my future boss had been indiscreet enough to tell me what my predecessor’s salary had been, I don’t think I would have made a comeback offer at all. It actually worked, probably because the compromise offer we came up with was a nice bump up for me but still a savings for my new employer. Up until I read this, though, I had thought that maybe another reason it was successful was that my hiring manager was a man, and therefore possibly more likely to be conditioned to expect negotiation as part of the hiring process. This study seems to indicate that may be true, but only when dealing with other men. If we hadn’t come to terms through negotiation – and truthfully, the additional vacation time I was asking for mattered more than the salary bump, since I’d reached a certain seniority level at the job I was leaving and didn’t want to go backwards on my time off – I’m pretty sure I would never be willing to try it again. And even though it did work out once, I’m still very hesitant about trying it again in any context where it’s a possibility – not just employment, but even major purchases like cars and houses (that last one’s a pipe dream in the Southern California real-estate market, but anyway…) – for the same reason: what’s defined here as the “social risks” of being perceived as difficult, uncooperative, and/or overly aggressive, and therefore losing an opportunity all together.

It’s interesting that men are more likely to penalize women for negotiating, but women don’t favor one sex over the other – we don’t want to have to address it at all, apparently. Given that, it’s also interesting that we’re more likely to approach negotiating with a woman than we are with a man, even if the woman is equally unlikely to reward us for it. It’s also worth noting that the results seem to reinforce two of women’s perceived strengths – gauging the emotional temperature of a situation and building consensus. But is taking what we’re offered, without discussion, really “consensus,” or even “compromise”? Or is it one of their similar-looking cousins, “avoidance of conflict” or “going along”?

So what rules are we supposed to play by, if we can’t win either way?

UPDATED to add this link: Scott Adams (Dilbert’s dad, of course) did a little experiment on his blog that I think reinforces the “social cues” thing, but with a slight twist.

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