The Athena Leadership Lab at Barnard College in New York is helping women step up their negotiating skills. They have a negotiation course coming up on Nov. 7, 2010 to be taught by Sara Laschever, co-author of "Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide". Sara, whose work has appeared in The New York Times and other publications and who served as a principal interviewer for Project Access, a landmark Harvard University study on women and careers in science, answered these questions for me:
Why do you think women hesitate to ask for a raise or a bigger job?
Women are socialized as children to avoid acting in ways that may be perceived as pushy, greedy, grabby, or selfish. As a culture, we like girls who are good-natured and compliant rather than “demanding” or “conceited.” As a result, adult women worry that asking for more than they’re offered is a risky strategy and could end up backfiring. In many cases, they’re not wrong. Both men and women don’t like other women whom they perceive to be too aggressive, and negotiation is generally seen as an aggressive action. Women who are seen as too aggressive are often punished—colleagues don’t invite them to collaborate with them, bosses don’t assign them to high-prestige accounts or projects or teams, people don’t give them referrals in businesses where referrals are essential to build a practice, and other men and women, peers and supervisors, brand them with ugly names: Difficult, high-maintenance, bossy, overbearing, mannish, not a team player....
The problem is compounded because girls and women who focus on the needs and goals of other people don’t develop the habit of thinking of their work in terms of its market value. If you always expect someone else to decide what you deserve and give it to you, you never learn how to assess the value of your work accurately. When women don’t know what their work is actually worth or how valuable their skills and experience may be to their employers, they’re unsure what to ask for—unsure of what they deserve—and so they hesitate.
Women are also hampered by their exclusion from many of the social and professional networks in which men exchange a lot of information and offer each other guidance. They tell each other what to ask for, when to ask, whom to ask, how to ask. With much less information and little advice, women don’t feel confident that it’s okay to ask for what they want and they’re not sure how to ask well.
2. Now that 50% of the workplace is made up of women, do you see change in the air? More opportunity?
One can only hope. More women are working, more women are bringing home bigger paychecks than their male partners, more women are sole breadwinners, and more women are single heads-of-households. Nonetheless, women in top leadership roles remain scarce, the proportions of senior women in many fields has remained low and unchanged, and certain industries, such as high finance, seem to be shedding executive women in the wake of the economic downturn faster than they’ve been shedding men. The pay gap between men and women remains huge.
On the other hand, many large corporations have begun to recognize that women are getting far more education than men these days. In the US, women get 57 or 58 % of bachelor’s degrees and close to 60 % of master’s degrees these days. There’s a similar trend in Canada, Western Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and the emerging economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China. So big companies, especially the multi-nationals, realize that they need to find ways to attract, retain, and promote the most talented women because they’re going to make up a much bigger piece of the educated talent pool. They don’t want to threaten their competitive advantage by hiring, training, and underutilizing this valuable resource.
3. Do you think women spend enough time encouraging other women in the workplace?
The lack of women in senior positions means there aren’t enough of them to mentor all the deserving younger women. On the other hand, there are thousands of women’s professional associations, affinity groups, and networking organizations, all of them created to help women connect, share information, and figure out together how best to achieve their professional goals. I’ve spoken to many of these groups, and the women in them exhibit wonderful camaraderie and mutual support.
4. Can you give us a few suggestions about how to negotiate a raise?
1. Do your research. Get on the web, go to job sites and the sites of professional associations in your field, talk to people (men and women) who can give you advice, learn as much as you can both about the range of compensation typically paid to people at your level and about the context in which you’ll be making your request (how the company is doing and its plans for the future, how your boss likes to be asked, when’s the best time to ask, etc.).
2. Set a high target for yourself. There’s a direct correlation between your goal going into a negotiation and what you get. Women tend to aim too low and get less.
3. Practice in advance. Get together with a friend or colleague whom you trust, brief this person thoroughly about the negotiation, and then play it through several times. Get your friend to bear down hard: Insult you, hurt your feelings, embarrass you, make you angry. You want to have a chance to respond to anything that might make you lose your composure. Practice calm, unruffled replies that move things away from emotionalism and conflict and over toward joint problem-solving and collaboration. If the other negotiator responds to your request by acting shocked or annoyed, rather than conceding too much immediately or apologizing, you can say, “Wow, we’re really far apart. Let’s see if we can meet in the middle.” Or, “I didn’t mean to scare you, what do you think would be more reasonable.” Or, “Hmm. Can you explain why you see things that way?” Or, “Tell me what problems you foresee in giving me what I’ve asked for. Maybe I can help with those.” Role-playing beforehand has a secondary benefit. Not only do you plan what you’re going to say, but you spare yourself the distraction of a strong emotion in the middle of the negotiation. Once you’ve had the feeling (anger, embarrassment, whatever) in the role-play, if it happens during the actual negotiation it won’t surprise you, and it turns out that it’s the surprise as much as anything that derails people. They switch their attention to figuring out why they’re upset and lose sight of their plan and their goals for the negotiation.
4. Use your social skills to present yourself as friendly, unthreatening, and upbeat during the actual negotiation (practice this in your role-play). Research shows that for women to be persuasive and influential, they need to be perceived as likeable. So it’s not enough for you to make a strong argument for what you want, you also need to present that argument in a way that conforms to our requirements for female behavior—sociable, warm, pleasant. Your personal style can have a big impact on your success.
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