Nice girls don’t ask

How can more women get to the corporate summit? After years of equal opportunity, female bosses such as Hewlett-Packard’s Carly Fiorina and Xerox’s Anne Mulcahy remain rarities. Women, according to a survey by Catalyst, a lobbying group, now hold nearly twice as many senior management positions in big American firms as they did in 1995 — but the percentage is still only 15.7 percent.

In Britain, things are no better, according to the Econo-mist in a recent article. A recent report by Laura Tyson head of the London Business School and a former chairman of America’s Council of Economic Advisers, notes that 30 percent of British managers are female. But many are in the “marzipan” layer just below the top-executive icing, from which non-executive directors are rarely picked; or else in such unfashionable areas as human resources. “Women account for only 11 percent of non-executive directors of the largest, FTSE 100, firms; eight percent at FTSE 250 firms; and fewer than four percent at small quoted firms,” the article said. Tyson suggests casting the recruitment net wider, and also drawing more non-executives from professional services, where women do better than in corporate management. But why do women so rarely reach the boardroom? The Catalyst survey, published in the latest Harvard Business Review (HBR), finds that senior managers agree that the big problem is women’s lack of line-management experience. In Fortune 500 companies, 90 percent of senior line managers are men. Why don’t women get such jobs? One reason may be that they view work differently from men.

New research by Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics finds that men are three times as likely as women to regard themselves as “work-centred.” Women want opportunities, but not a life dominated by work. Men and women are still treated unequally in the workplace, found the Harvard Business Review in its October issue. “Women continue to earn less, on average, for the same performance, and they remain under-represented in top jobs.” Research has shown that both conscious and subconscious biases contribute to this problem. But there is another, subtler source of inequality: Women often don’t get what they want and deserve because they don’t ask for it. In three separate studies, it was found that men are more likely than women to negotiate for what they want. This can be costly for companies — and it requires management intervention. But research by economists at two American universities suggest that, even in the job market, women behave in ways that disadvantage them. At the University of Chicago’s business school, Uri Gneezy and a group of colleagues have used novel techniques to show that women and men have different attitudes to competing. In one study that is about to appear in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, groups of students were paid to solve simple maze problems on a computer. In some groups, everybody was paid 50 cents per problem solved; in others, a payment of $3 per problem went only to the individual who solved most mazes. Female performance was much the same in both groups; but in the second lot, the average man did about 50 percent better than in the first.

A second study, of physical tasks, showed similar results. When nine- and ten-year-old children ran a race alone, boys and girls clocked similar speeds. When children raced in pairs, girls’ speed hardly altered. But boys ran faster when paired with a boy, and faster still when racing against a girl. Mr Gneezy points out that, if men try harder when competing, they will disproportionately win the top jobs, even when to do the job well does not require an ability to compete. Job selection is itself highly competitive. Lina Babcock of Carnegie Mellon University finds “that women may do worse than men even when they win a job, because they take a different approach to negotiation.” Babcock, who recounts her studies in a forthcoming book, noticed that male graduates with a master’s degree from her university earned starting salaries almost $4,000 or 7.6 percent, higher than female students. But when she asked who had simply accepted the initial pay offer and who had asked for more, only seven percent of women, compared with 57 percent of men, turned out to have negotiated. On average, those who negotiated raised the initial offer by $4,053 — almost exactly the difference between men’s and women’s starting pay. Babcock felt some exasperation because, “I teach negotiation here, and I’m always telling students to negotiate.”

A laboratory study confirmed her findings. With her colleagues Michele Gelfand and Deborah Small, she advertised a payment of between $3 and $10 for students who would pay four rounds of Boggle, a parlour game. At the end, hired actors posing as experimenters said to each student, “Here’s $3. Is that okay?” Astonishingly, nine times as many men as women tried to negotiate for more. Most studies of negotiation, Babcock points out, miss such findings because they do not consider why it is that people start to haggle. She suspects that women feel uncomfortable with negotiating because they think it inappropriate, or do not feel that they are entitled to ask for more money, or think it may damage a relationship with an employer. Instead, they feel unhappy and resentful when they see men ask for and receive better treatment. But “this is a lightbulb issue,” she says: when she tells women what men achieve by negotiating, they are more likely to ask too.

According to HBR, the largest of the three studies, surveyed several hundred people over the Internet, asking respondents about the most recent negotiations they’d attempted or initiated and when they expected to negotiate next. The study, said HBR, showed that men place themselves in negotiation situations more often than women do and regard more of their interactions as potential negotiations. Women are less likely than men to negotiate for themselves for several reasons. First, they often are socialised from an early age not to promote their own interests and to focus instead on the needs of others. “The messages girls receive — from parents, teachers, other children, the media, and society in general — can be so powerful that when they grow up they may not realise that they’ve internalised this behaviour, or they may realise it but not understand and how it affects their willingness to negotiate.” Women, said the Economist, tend to assume that they will be recognised and rewarded for working hard and doing a good job. Unlike men, they haven’t been taught that they can ask for more.

Second, many companies’ cultures penalise women when they do ask — further discouraging them from doing so. Women who assertively pursue their own ambitions and promote their own interests may be labeled as bitchy or pushy. They frequently see their work devalued and find themselves ostracised or excluded from access to important information. These responses from women’s colleagues and supervisors may not be conscious or part of any concerted effort to “hold women back.” “More typically, they’re a product of society’s ingrained expectations about how women should act,” said the authors. As a result, women in business often watch their male colleagues pull ahead, receive better assignments, get promoted more quickly, and earn more money. Observing these inequities, women become disenchanted with their employers. When a better offer comes along, rather than using that offer as a negotiating tool, women may take it and quit. This happens even in organisations that make concerted efforts to treat women fairly. Managers who believe (rightly) that an important part of their job is to keep their employees happy may give women smaller pieces of the pie simply because they give their employers what they ask for. They do not realise that the men are asking for a lot more than the women are.

Managers need to confront this problem. At the individual level, they can mentor the women they supervise, advising them of the benefits (and the necessity) of asking for what they need to do their jobs effectively and fulfil their professional goals. Managers also can make sure that women understand how many aspects of their working lives can be negotiated. This can effectively compensate for women’s more limited access to many of the professional and social networks in which men learn these lessons. “Our studies found that women respond immediately and powerfully to advising and rapidly begin to see the world as a much more negotiable place,” it was noted. Managers also should pay attention to the different rates at which men and women ask for advantages and opportunities. For example, managers shouldn’t assume that the person requesting an assignment (often a male) wants it the most — and therefore will be the most motivated and do the best job. Good managers should realise that an equally qualified woman might be just as interested and motivated. “Similarly, when a man asks for a raise and a woman doing comparable work does not, a good manager should consider giving both, or neither, of them raises. That way, the manager can help to ensure that the company is treating its employees equitably and prevent the woman from becoming disillusioned if she later discovers a pay difference. Managers can also develop detailed and transparent systems to evaluate whether they’re doling out opportunities and rewards to all employees based on skills and merit, rather than on who asks and who doesn’t. Incentives for managers themselves don’t hurt either: They should be measured on how all of their reports are advancing.

Finally, managers should drive large scale cultural change. Throughout any organisation, undoubtedly, people respond in different ways to the same behaviour in men and women — behaviour that in a man might be called assertive or principled in a woman might be considered overbearing and strident, for example. By finding ways to examine different responses, leaders can open eyes to hidden barriers and crate an atmosphere in which women and men can ask and receive — equally.