Challenges Facing Women Negotiators

HISTORICALLY, women have faced significant hurdles in employment negotiations. Here’s what we know about these barriers, plus strategies leaders can use to improve fairness in the workplace.

The Barriers that Women Face

In 2006, Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock and her colleagues published research showing that women tend to initiate negotiations, particularly salary negotiations, significantly less often than men do. The findings appeared to at least partially explain the enduring pay gap between men and women, which has remained frustratingly stable from 2002 to 2023.

In a 2007 study, Harvard Kennedy School professor Hannah Riley Bowles, Babcock, and California State University professor Lei Lai found that evaluators penalized female job candidates who asked for higher pay, but not male candidates. Evaluators viewed women who asked for greater compensation less favorably than men who did so and were less interested in working with the women the future.

Women appeared to face a catch-22: If they asked for more, they risked being viewed negatively.

About 20 years have passed since research on gender differences in negotiation and tailored salary negotiation tips for women began to emerge. Have things changed? Yes and no. On the one hand, evidence suggests that many women are negotiating compensation more assertively. Unfortunately, however, these efforts have failed to move the needle on the gender pay gap.

Women Do Ask

In a 2024 study, researchers Laura Kray (University of California, Berkeley), Jessica Kennedy (Vanderbilt Business School), and Margaret Lee (UC Berkeley) surveyed 990 graduates of a top U.S. business school between 2015 and 2019 about whether they negotiated the salary of their first post-MBA job. The women reported negotiating salary more often than men: 54% of women said they did, while 44% of men did. And in a survey of nearly 2,000 B-school alumni, Kray and colleagues found that 64% of women and 59% of men reported negotiating for promotions or higher compensation.

It seems that after the message on gender and salary negotiations came out around 2007, both men and women—but especially women—began to negotiate compensation more frequently. Nonetheless, recent female MBA graduates still earn less than their male peers: 88% of men’s earnings, a gap that widens to 63% after 10 years, report Kray and her team.

If Salary Negotiations Aren’t the Problem, What Is?

“Our research shows that women are willing to do their part to close the gender pay gap,” says Kennedy. “Unfortunately, negotiating well isn’t enough to close the gender pay gap. It’s not the source of the problem.”

If differences in men and women negotiating salary isn’t the source of the gender pay gap, what is?

“Economic studies show that the gender wage gap is explained more by differences in men’s and women’s career trajectories than by how men and women are paid for the same work,” according to Bowles. “We will make faster progress toward closing the gender wage gap by getting more women into high-paying jobs than by negotiating a little more money in lower-paid occupations.”

3 Strategies for Reducing Bias in Employment Negotiations

It’s smart for all of us to proactively negotiate our compensation, benefits, and work roles throughout our careers. But workers can only do so much on their own. To promote fairness, organizational leaders can take the following steps.

Institute more flexible, family-friendly policies and structures. This can include persuading people of all genders to take parental leave to creating more “substitutable work” that doesn’t require high earners to work grueling hours.

Reduce bias in hiring and promotion. In their new book, Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results, Harvard Kennedy School professors Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi argue that fairness initiatives should be built into organization-wide systems. Setting clear salary ranges and standardizing job interviews and performance evaluations can make job processes fairer for all employees.

Educate and mentor. Organizations can establish mentoring programs to help women, minorities, and others feel more comfortable negotiating assertively on their own behalf. They can also educate employees about common biases that negotiators face at the table and how they hold us all back. When people believe the “women don’t ask for more” narrative, they are less likely to support laws and policies aimed at reducing bias in negotiation, Kray and colleagues found. Spreading the word that women increasingly are negotiating as assertively as men could help build support for fairer policies.

By recognizing gender inequality in negotiations as a shared problem, we can both lessen the burden on women and promote more productive negotiations.

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Katie Shonk writes articles on negotiation and dispute resolution for the Program on Negotiation, a consortium program of Harvard University, MIT, and Tufts, dedicated to the study and practice of negotiation. The former editor of Negotiation Briefings, she is also a research associate at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School. Shonk received her BS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and her MA in creative writing from the University of Texas at Austin. She has published articles in the Harvard Business Review and other management journals. She is also the author of a novel, Happy Now?, and a short story collection, The Red Passport.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 11:52 AM
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