It’s
a concrete fact that women earn less than men do.
The true gender pay-gap is not known with certainty, but, when comparing
equally qualified people doing the same job, most estimates by labor economists
put it at 10% – 20%. The crucial question remains its cause. One
common explanation is that women are less likely to negotiate their salaries.
We’ve seen this in both bestselling business memoirs like Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and
in previous studies like the research-based Women Don’t Ask.
Gaining
access to a more recent, and more detailed, dataset allowed us to investigate
this question anew. What we found contradicts previous research. The bottom line of our study is that women do “ask”
just as often as men. They just don’t “get.”
Even
we were surprised by the results. We had expected to find less asking by the
females. Instead, we found that, holding background factors constant, women ask
for a raise just as often as men, but men are more likely to be successful.
Women who asked obtained a raise 15% of the time, while men obtained a pay
increase 20% of the time. While that may sound like a modest difference, over a
lifetime it really adds up.
We
also examined the idea that women act less assertively in negotiations for fear
of upsetting the relationship with their boss or colleagues (some evidence for
this has been found in previous research, notably by
Emily Amanatullah and Michael Morris in a 2010 paper). We found no support for this in our data. Instead, we
found that although employees do sometimes say that they do not ask for a raise
because of concern for their relationships in the workplace, this is equally
true of men and women. Both 14% of males and 14% of females say they have done
this.
