What If Women Learned To Ask?

The importance of starting salaries cannot be overstated as small initial differences will turn into large discrepancies over the years. Therefore the cumulative effects of the gender gap in asking can be massive. Your previous salary tends to determine how much you will be offered as it will be used as a benchmark. That’s why banning employers from asking about salary history has been debated so much in the USA. Several US states like California (starting January 2018), Massachusetts (starting July 2018) and Oregon (after January 2019) and also cities like New York City, Philadelphia and New Orleans have chosen to go forward with the ban. As written in this article in Business Insider:

“If there’s one thing job seekers hate, it’s the dreaded salary question: “How much did you make in your last job?” Interviewees just can’t win when it comes to this inquiry. Answer honestly, and you might get low-balled when it comes to your starting salary. Fudge your past earnings, and you risk getting caught in a lie and terminated.”

These laws will likely do some good because they will make it harder for employers to use the applicants’ salary histories against them. However they won’t eliminate the multiplier effect of initial salary differences. Indeed a person’s salary history also determines their sense of self worth, their perceived needs and lifestyle and how much they will ask for or accept in their next position.

Across generations, the tendency among women is to just accept what they are offered and not ask for more, whereas most men initiate negotiation more often (two to three times more often). Many reasons can be put forward, among which the fact that girls have been taught to value relationships more: “women worry more than men about the impact their actions will have on their relationships. This can prompt them to change their behaviour to protect personal connections”, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever explain, citing several academic studies.

Because “opportunity doesn’t always knock

Another reason is that women tend to think of their circumstances as more fixed (less negotiable) than they actually are. “Women expect life to be fair, and despite often dramatic evidence to the contrary, many of them persist in believing that it will be”. Psychologists answer the question with the notion of “locus of control” which is the degree to which people believe that they have control over the outcome of events in their lives, as opposed to external forces beyond their control (see Wikipedia).

Individuals with an “internal locus of control” are those who believe their fate to be influenced by internal factors (effort, motivation…): they “make life happen”. Conversely, people with an “external locus of control’ are those who feel that “life happens to them”, that a multitude of external factors will determine the outcomes of their lives (market, weather, chance…). It turns out that, on average, women tend to have a more external locus of control. This can be accounted for by the fact that until recently women’s fates really were determined by external factors (they’ve only had the right to vote for less than 100 years in most Western countries): as psychiatrist Linda Austin wrote in her book What’s Holding You Back, “the lives of women have been largely controlled by men until quite recently”. For millennia “women’s collective identity rested on the acknowledgement that our lives were indeed controlled by external forces”.

With their more external locus of control, women assume they have little control over what they are paid. The most optimistic among them tend to believe that life is a meritocracy: by working hard, doing a good job and following the rules, you will find success and be offered advancement. Meanwhile, a majority of men have learned to be more aggressive about what they want, to advertise their achievements, sell their ideas or “hustle” their way to the top. As children, boys tend to be encouraged more than girls to challenge the status quo and make their own rules and are directed towards “unstructured” forms of play more often.

Low expectations have an impact on the outcome

There won’t be any negotiation if the parties are already satisfied with the status quo. You must be dissatisfied with what you have to want to ask for more. And women, the authors of Why Women Don’t Ask argue, are often satisfied with less. Many scholars believe that women may be satisfied with less because they expect a lot less. It all boils down to expectations: “since lower expectations are more likely to be filled than higher ones, the odds are better that these women will be satisfied with the rewards that life sends their way”.

Up until recently a lot of women devoted their time to unpaid labour (domestic chores, childcare…). Even today, most of the world’s unpaid labour is performed by women. A lot of the global value created by women is not recorded in the GDP! They are less used to thinking of their work in terms of its monetary value. In short, we all have a “historical predisposition against recognizing the economic value of what society deems to women’s work” (Babcock & Laschever).

As women take on more unpaid work (i.e. when they become mothers), their paid work suffers even more. There is a “bigger wage gap between mothers and childless women than between young men and women”. In other words, there is a kind of double penalty: not only do women perform more unpaid work, but the more they do, the less the rest of their work gets paid. As a result, women “suffer from a limited understanding of their market power”.

Having been trained to think that they will work “for love” rather than money, most women are reluctant to negotiate their pay. It is striking how jobs that are dominated by a female workforce (education, childcare, healthcare…) rely on the notion that workers are entirely devoted to their “mission” (the love of others) to the detriment of pay. Working “for love” is almost like a moral imperative and a lot of women wrongly assume that love and pay are mutually exclusive.