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.
Some relevant personality-trait research is also summarized in Women Don’t Ask. On the well-validated Locus of Control Scale (which measures the extent to which respondents see themselves in control of their lives, as opposed to being the pawns of fate, nature, or circumstances), women on average score as feeling more externally controlled than men. External locus of control tends to correlate in turn with a low sense of self-entitlement and with a tendency not to undertake activities that might advance one’s own interests. The cumulative result of these differences for many women (in terms of reduced lifetime earnings, missed opportunities, and heightened stress) is not trivial.
Babcock and Laschever have several reasons for concluding that it is nurture, more than nature, that produces such differences. For instance, their survey found that women are quite adept at negotiating with their children: when it comes to setting firm boundaries with kids, most are far from being pushovers. Moreover, there is substantial evidence that women can be as bold on average as men when they are advocating for people other than themselves. And finally, the same pattern of a more external locus of control, a lowered sense of self-entitlement, and hesitancy to take risks on one’s own behalf has also been shown to characterize African Americans of both sexes. The “Don’t Ask” syndrome, they conclude, is a learned, self-protective set of responses by persons of any disempowered social status, with its narrowed range of opportunities and risk of punishment for stepping outside one’s assigned place. This learned sense of helplessness and self-effacement lingers on, even when circumstances change and greater opportunities are available.
The authors invoke a range of individual, institutional, and occasionally legal solutions that can help bridge the gendered negotiation divide, and some of these are heartening to read about. For example, within one decade the accounting and consulting firm Deloitte and Touche mounted several programs for training, mentoring, and accommodating the needs of women. The result? A tripling of the firm’s percentage of female partners, a huge narrowing of the gender gap in managerial turnover, and a savings of almost a quarter of a billion dollars in hiring and training costs. Helping women to succeed, it turns out, is better for the bottom line than clinging to comfortable but inefficient gender stereotypes. And in the case of Deloitte and Touche, benefits such as flextime and reduced travel loads were emphatically and consistently made available to professionals of both sexes, to the evident relief of male employees who had long wanted a better work/home balance in their lives, but feared jeopardizing their own careers if they asked.
A significant problem with this volume, however, is that in a sense it has been written backwards. Most of its chapters document in depressing detail the origins and results of women’s tendency to negotiate less toughly than men—many of whom relish the drama of bluff, intimidation, and unsettling their opposition. But toward the end, the authors suddenly introduce readers to recent managerial literature (including Roger Fisher and William Ury’s famous volume, Getting to Yes) which claims that collaborative, “win/win” negotiation strategies are, on a wide range of measures and in the long run, better both for individuals and organizations. And here it turns out that the relevant skills are ones with which women, long socialized in relationship maintenance, tend to be quite competent and comfortable. These include focusing on problems rather than defending established positions, asking careful diagnostic questions, sharing information about relevant interests, and separating (or, when appropriate, clustering) the salient issues.
The volume would have been rhetorically much more effective if it had begun—rather than ended—with some of this good news. And I use the term “good news” deliberately, since Jesus did not portray life in God’s kingdom as a zero-sum game: one in which if someone wins, others necessarily lose. He likened it rather to a mustard seed, which begins tiny but ends up producing a huge tree with room for all kinds of creatures in its branches. Or to yeast, a small amount of which greatly expands a modest lump of dough. Because all measures of behavioral sex differences produce highly overlapping bell-curve distributions of scores (just as measures of men’s and women’s heights do), we know that there are plenty of men who are also turned off by aggressive, self-promoting negotiation tactics. As with just war theory, there may be times when, in self-defense or defense of others, hard-headed negotiating tactics may be a last-resort necessity. But this shouldn’t be the norm, and by focusing so long on women’s deficits in this area, the authors for too much of their book write like default liberal feminists. They in effect seem to ask (like Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady) “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man?”—as if stereotypically male aggression, just because it is associated with power, is necessarily something to be cultivated by either sex.
A further problem is the book’s hastily tacked-on, five-page epilogue titled “Negotiating at Home.” The authors’ stated reason for giving domestic justice such short shrift is that most of the existing negotiation research looks at waged-work situations. But in fact there is a huge (and hugely relevant) related literature on domestic relationship quality and satisfaction, and on power and influence in intimate relationships.1
In spite of these deficiencies, Women Don’t Ask is a helpful and readable introduction to an important topic in organizational psychology. Both the book of Deuteronomy () and the Apostle Paul (in 1 Cor. 9:9 and 1 Tim. 5:18) warn us that we are not to muzzle a threshing ox—a theme that Jesus picks up in Matthew 10:10 when he says that laborers are worthy of their hire. It is surely significant that Jesus alludes to workplace justice so soon after his Sermon on the Mount, which has often been used to suggest that Christians (and especially women) should be endlessly self-effacing. But my husband the biblical scholar tells me that in both Hebrew and Greek the word for “ox” is gender dimorphic—it refers to both sexes. And, of course, so does the cultural mandate of Genesis 1:26-28, in which God calls both members of the human primal pair both to responsible dominion and to responsible sociability. At least in the latter part of their volume, Babcock and Laschever give us reason to hope that fulfilling this mandate is possible and desirable for both sexes.
Mary Stewart Van Leeuwen is professor of psychology and philosophy and resident scholar, Hestenes Center for Christian Women in Leadership, at Eastern University. She is the author most recently of My Brother’s Keeper (InterVarsity).
1. Comprehensive psychology of gender texts routinely review this literature: a good example is Hilary Lips’ Sex and Gender (Mayfield, 2001), now in its fourth edition. For a more thoroughly interdisciplinary treatment of waged work/home work issues and gender relations (and one which respects the resources of the Christian tradition for promoting gender justice), readers might try legal scholar Joan Williams’ Unbending Gender: Why Work and Family Conflict and What to Do About It (Oxford Univ. Press, 2000).
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