Women are more likely to negotiate than men, but are told ‘no’ more often

In 2003, researchers Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever highlighted a troubling trend in their book, Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. The book looked at research that found men were more likely to ask for higher pay than women with the same qualifications, and offered “positive strategies for change.”

More than 15 years later, women’s shortcomings when it comes to negotiation are still consistently highlighted as a reason they continue to earn less on average than men. New research, though, suggests this notion is not true: Women do try to negotiate, and today, they do so at a higher rate than men.

Laura Kray, a psychologist and coauthor of the paper, told HR Brew she hopes the findings spur HR departments to take a closer look at how they respond when workers seek to negotiate their salaries.

Female MBA graduates are more likely to negotiate. The study, which was published by the Academy of Management Discoveries in August, drew upon exit survey responses from graduating students who attended a top MBA program from 2015–2019, as well as a separate survey of alumni from the same program. The name of the MBA program was not disclosed in the research.

Among the graduating students, more than one-half (54%) of women surveyed reported they negotiated their job offers, compared to 44% of men. Similarly, female alumni surveyed were more likely to report negotiating for a promotion or better compensation in their jobs than men. Still, these women earned 22% less than the men surveyed, the study found.

It isn’t just female MBA grads who negotiate more. Kray and her coauthor conducted a separate meta-analysis of nine studies examining gender differences in salary negotiations that found women began negotiating more than men as far back as 2002, before Women Don’t Ask was published. By 2015, studies show women negotiated at a statistically significant higher rate than men. Nevertheless, US women still earn 82 cents for every dollar made by men as of 2022, Pew Research estimated.

The prevailing belief that women don’t ask for higher pay leads to less support for policies designed to close the gender pay gap, such as salary history bans, said Kray, a professor at University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. The notion “reinforces the idea that women are somehow deficient in their negotiating skills,” and prompts messaging akin to, “We need to fix the women, not fix society,” she said.

How HR can combat pay, negotiation disparities. Going forward, Kray said she hopes these findings will inform the way HR pros approach compensation. There are many contributing factors to the gender pay gap, including occupational sorting, but the role bias and discrimination may play shouldn’t be overlooked, either.

Kray said HR should be auditing compensation requests and including gender breakdowns, if they aren’t already. The research found that women are not only more likely to negotiate than men, but they’re also told “no” more often, she said.

“HR should be tracking requests, tracking responses, justifying these decisions…and making sure that it’s not [that] the identical ask is being responded to differently for men versus women,” she said. “If there [are] gaps, then they need to be able to explain, why are we saying yes to men more than we are to women?”