Career Women Rules | Make Softspoken Demands

Maryna Linchuk & Tom Welling by Steven Meisel US Vogue May 2008Just now I posted research out of Rutgers confirming that although women were 54% of voters in the 2008 elections, they’ve leveled out at 24% of seats in state legislators. In the list of ways to put more women in office, the study authors recommended inviting more women to run for office. Women like to be asked.

After all these years, we women still want to be asked to the political party. Perhaps, I am too harsh, reading Can “Nice Girls” Negotiate? by Whitney Johnson for the Harvard Business Review.

The usual commentary is that women don’t ask for money, that we rarely seek a salary competitive with men’s or go about the research required to know the range of our salary expectations. In Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling, we refresh our minds with the group of graduate students at Carnegie Mellon University who lodged a complaint that women were working only as teaching assistants in PhD programs, while the men were all teaching courses.

“The dean said each of the guys had come to him and said, ‘I want to teach a course,’ and none of the women had done that,” she said. “The female students had expected someone to send around an e-mail saying, ‘Who wants to teach?’ ” The incident prompted Babcock to start systematically studying gender differences when it comes to asking for pay raises, resources or promotions. And what she found was that men and women are indeed often different when it comes to opening negotiations.

Like women aspiring to political office, the women PhD students expected to be offered a class to teach.

Maryna Linchuk & Tom Welling by Steven Meisel, US Vogue May 2008This isn’t the end of the research. WaPo writer Shankar Vedantam reviews other studies which suggest that women are penalized for for being ‘aggressive’. A study of by Linda C. Babcock (sponsor of the female teaching assistant’s compalint) and Hannah Riley Bowles of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and co-author Carnegie Mellon researcher Lei Lai found that men and women get very different reactions when negotiating.

“What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not,” Bowles said. “They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not.”

“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.”

Looking for post 2007 research, I found another study from that year, one released in Britain Does It Pay To Be Nice? Personality and Earnings in the UK. This study said ‘yes’ that in analyzing a large group of 5,600 men and women, results confirmed that women who adopt a masculine, alpha-female approach earned 4% more than passive female colleagues. Women deemed anxious or moody earled 3% less.

The same study found that although personality traits were as key as intelligence in determining women’s salaries, they had little effect on a man’s earing potential.

New York University professor Clay Shirky says the problem isn’t about psychology, when it comes to getting what you want in many organizations:

I’m not concerned that women don’t engage in enough building of self-confidence or self-esteem. I’m worried about something much simpler: not enough women have what it takes to behave like arrogant self-aggrandizing jerks. via Business Week

I’m often the first person to tell women to suck it in and stand up for themselves. All researchers agree we must, but they remind me that the reality of negotiating almost any topic  is dicier for women than men. That’s a fact. Anne

Photos: Fashon Gone Rogue and Brandish