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Women Don't Ask Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever Princeton Univ. Press, 2003 223 pp. $24.95

Responding to recommendations from its own professors, Princeton University recently set aside $10 million to accelerate the recruitment, hiring, and retention of women faculty in science and engineering. In parallel fashion, since the turn of the millennium Princeton University Press has accelerated the rate at which it is publishing topnotch volumes by scholars in politics, law, labor relations, and management on questions of gender justice in the United States. These include Christina Wolbrecht's award-winning Politics of Women's Rights: Parties, Position and Changes (2000); Nancy Hirschman's The Subject of Liberty: Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom (2002); and Dorothy Cobble's The Other Women's Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (2003). A recent addition to this list, but one of more mixed quality, is Women Don't Ask by Carnegie Mellon economics and management professor Linda Babcock and writer Sara Laschever.

The subject of the book as expressed in its subtitle—"Negotiation and the Gender Divide"—is not unimportant. Reviewing a number of studies using a range of methodologies—laboratory experiments, social surveys, personality trait scales, case studies—the authors tell us that women on average do not negotiate on their own behalf as often or as successfully as men do. This is the case whether the object of the negotiation is a more just division of labor at home, a more equitable divorce settlement, a raise or job assignment, a business contract, or even simple recognition of a job well done. Moreover, a significant gender gap remains even when factors such as age, education, and professional experience are controlled for. In a representative experimental study conducted by Babcock, individual students were recruited to play a game of skill and told they would be paid between three and ten dollars after four rounds of the game. However, at the end each student was told "Here's three dollars—is that ok?" Students who asked for more money were promptly given ten dollars, but students who said nothing or merely groused about the low amount (as many of both sexes did) got nothing extra. In this study almost nine times as many men as women made a direct request for more money—and this in the absence of any sex differences in actual task performance.

A similar gap appears in surveys about real-life negotiating behavior: men on average initiate (and plan to initiate) more negotiations than women in a wide range of work situations and across a wide range of age and education levels. In addition, women on average express more anxiety and reluctance to negotiate on their own behalf, even when they recognize it as appropriate and necessary. Babcock's own interviews of a large sample of persons confirmed this anxiety gap. Her female respondents were apt to say things like "I find it really hard to ask for things for myself"; "I was taught from a very young age that good girls don't beg"; "I've been told all my life that if I have something I should give it to someone else"; or "I get nervous about asking because I don't think I deserve anything I want." Her male respondents (even in so-called feminine professions like nursing) were more apt to say "I deserve the things I want—yeah"; or "As a man I've been raised with this sense of entitlement, that I should get what I want." And this entitlement gap, with resulting differences in self-confident negotiation on one's own behalf, begins young. The authors of an extensive review of the literature on gender and self-esteem noted that boys are expected from a young age to develop and display self-confidence, while for girls this is often still seen as a gender-role violation.

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