Assertiveness and the Advocacy Paradox
The men and women were equally qualified, but the men were earning substantially more money.
Linda Babcock, an economist at Carnegie Mellon University, stared at the data in dismay. Although it
was the twenty-first century, the male MBA graduates from her school had 7.6 percent higher salaries
than their female counterparts. Carnegie Mellon is one of the world’s finest technical institutions,
boasting eighteen Nobel Prize winners, including seven in economics alone. When business students
enroll for their MBAs at Carnegie Mellon, they are signing up for a serious quantitative challenge.
The school offers degrees in computational finance, quantitative economics, and software
engineering, and over 40 percent of all Carnegie Mellon MBAs accept jobs in finance. In such a
quantitatively intense environment, the salary numbers suggested that women still face a glass ceiling.
Babcock calculated that over a thirty-five-year career, this gap meant that each woman was losing an
average of more than $1 million.
But the gender gap, it turns out, wasn’t quite due to a glass ceiling. Men and women received
similar starting offers, and the discrepancy emerged by the time they signed their final offers. Upon
closer inspection, Babcock discovered a dramatic difference between men and women in the
willingness to ask for more money. More than half of the men—57 percent—tried to negotiate their
starting salaries, compared with only 7 percent of the women. The men were more than eight times as
likely to negotiate as the women. The students who did negotiate (mostly men) improved their
salaries by an average of 7.4 percent, enough to account for the gender gap.
The discrepancy in willingness to negotiate wasn’t limited to the quantitative world of Carnegie
Mellon MBAs. In another study, Babcock and her colleagues recruited people to play four rounds of
Boggle for a fee of somewhere between $3 and $10. When they finished, the researcher acted like a
taker, handing them the minimum of $3 and asking, “Is three dollars okay?” Once again, eight times as
many men as women asked for more money. The next study went the same way, but the researcher
handed them the minimum of $3 without asking if it was okay. None of the women asked for more
money, whereas 13 percent of the men took the initiative to ask for more. With another group of
participants, the researcher handed over $3 and said, “The exact payment is negotiable.” The majority
of the men (59 percent) seized the opportunity and asked for more, compared with only 17 percent of
the women. Overall, the men were 8.3 times more likely to ask for more money than the women. In
each case, the women were doormats, allowing takers to walk all over them. Research shows that one
of the main reasons that women tend to negotiate less assertively than men is that they worry about
violating social expectations that they’ll be warm and kind.*
Yet women aren’t the only ones who become pushovers at the bargaining table. The doormat
effect is a curse that afflicts givers of both genders. In several experiments, male and female givers
were willing to make large concessions just to reach an agreement that would make their counterparts
happy, even if they had better options available. And in a series of studies led by Notre Dame
professor Timothy Judge, nearly four thousand Americans filled out a survey on whether they were
givers, indicating the degree to which they tended to be helpful, caring, and trusting. On average, the
givers earned 14 percent lower income than their less giving counterparts, taking an annual pay hit of
nearly $7,000. When the data were split by gender, the income penalty was three times greater for
giver men than giver women. The female givers earned an average of 5.47 percent less money than