Armed to ask for that pay rise
In 2003 a series of Harvard Business School studies uncovered some unsettling findings about the discrepancy between what men and women earn.
The first study showed that, among recent MBA graduates employed at Carnegie Mellon, men were eight times more likely to negotiate their starting salary than their female peers.
It meant the men started out earning 7.6 per cent more than the women did on their first day.
In the second study, which took place in a lab, men and women were observed playing a game and were told they would be paid between $3 and $10 for taking part. At the experiment’s end, when they were asked if $3 was acceptable, men requested more money nine times more often than women did.
A third, larger and online, study asked how often men and women had negotiated. The findings? Men negotiate far more often and regard more interactions as opportunities for negotiation than women do.
So is the trick to closing the seemingly intractable pay gap, for women to simply ask for more?
Sadly not. In 2005 Hannah Riley Bowles of Harvard University and Linda Babcock and Lei Lai of Carnegie Mellon University pierced a hole through the popular theory that women are too polite about money.
Their study showed that, if you are a woman, it does hurt to ask for more. Managers were less likely to want to work with female employees who had asked for a pay increase than those who had not.
Women who negotiated for higher compensation were considered far more demanding and less ‘‘nice’’ than those who didn’t ask for what they wanted.
Men were not penalised in this way. The researchers concluded this was because women asking for more contravened the social norms expected from women.
‘‘Negotiating in an assertive, selfinterested way contradicts the feminine stereotype of women as selfless caregivers, and the social costs of contradicting this stereotype can be significant,’’ Bowles explains.
‘‘This social cost is substantially greater for women than for men.’’
Social costs aside, a 2016 study found that Australian women actually ask for a pay rise as often as their male colleagues but they don’t succeed as often. Men are 25 per cent more likely to get a raise when they ask for one than women are.
The data used for the global study Do Women Ask by London’s Cass Business School, the University of Warwick and the University of Wisconsin was from Australia because it is the only country in the world that collects systematic information on whether employees have asked for a rise.
A randomly chosen sample of 4600 Australian workers across more than 800 employers found no support for the idea that women earn less because they are not as pushy as men.
‘‘Ours is the first proper test of the reticent-female theory, and the evidence doesn’t stand up,’’ co-author Dr Amanda Goodall, from the Cass Business School in London, said. –Sydney Morning Herald