Women's Career Negotiations: A Workshop

This week at WAPPP, we got a special treat. Professor Hannah Riley Bowles, Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Kennedy School and WAPPP’s Research Director, presented some of her work on gender and negotiation. This seminar was a great opportunity to not only hear about cutting-edge gender research, but to begin to apply it to ourselves and our organizations. While the material presented focused mostly on women and career negotiations, Professor Riley Bowles noted that all of this is good advice for men, too. However, many of her insights have special relevance for women as they navigate potential career pitfalls.

Much of the popular literature around negotiation focuses on pay, but there are many more reasons to negotiate in your career. Negotiation can enhance your recognition and rewards, play a key role in seizing opportunities to expand your authority, or be used to overcome barriers or career challenges. In a survey of 364 female executives, 80% reported a recent career negotiation, which casts significant doubt on the idea that “women don’t negotiate.” The most common reason to negotiate was seeking a new position or a leadership opportunity, rather than negotiating compensation.

Interestingly, while white and black women in the sample had the same level of seniority, white women reported significantly higher rates of negotiation. While there is not much data on intersectionality and negotiation, this is an important aspect that deserves greater consideration. It is also important to recognize that career negotiations are a two-level game. Negotiations with employers are contingent on negotiations at home and divisions of household labor that help women succeed in their careers. While most literature focuses on employer/employee negotiations, research suggests that these domestic negotiations have a bigger effect on the gender wage gap.

Ambiguity plays a major role in the negotiation gender gap. In particular, there are three key sources of ambiguity: ambiguity about who is negotiating, ambiguity about how to negotiate, and ambiguity about what is negotiable. When you don’t know much about the person you’re negotiating with, it heightens the potential for stereotypic attribution. You may look for salient cues like gender and be more inclined to use that information the less you know about someone. The question of how to negotiate appears to be particularly impactful for women. When professionals are provided with information about the negotiation norms of a company, we see no gender gap in willingness to negotiate. This gender gap only appears when it’s not clear how, when, or whether to negotiate. Finally, there may be significant ambiguity about what is negotiable and what can be put on the table. This ambiguity increases gender gaps in outcomes and may encourage gender stereotypic distribution of resources.

These three forms of ambiguity are problematic because they open the door for issues stemming from gendered social networks and gender stereotypes. Your social network can have a profound impact on the type and quality of information and advice you receive. Individuals tend to form social networks with people like them—men’s social networks in particular are homogeneous and tend to consist of overlapping work and friendship ties. Women report more diverse work ties, but their friendship ties tend to be concentrated outside of work. A man who reaches out to a male colleague and friend for career advice may get significantly different information than a woman who reaches out to the same colleague.

Gender stereotypes can also significantly affect negotiation performance. Descriptive stereotypes (“the way men/women are…”) can seep into our subconscious and trigger stereotype threat. If women are implicitly reminded that they’re supposedly weaker at negotiating, it may jeopardize their negotiation success. Interestingly, according to Professor Riley Bowles, if you explicitly tell men and women that men do better at negotiation because they’re rational-analytic, men get nervous (because they’re not sure it’s true), women get angry, and the gender gap in negotiation outcomes reverses. Prescriptive stereotypes (the way men/women should be…”) also have a major impact on the gender gap in negotiations. Women incur a much larger social cost for negotiating than men, perhaps because they are perceived as “not very nice,” “too demanding,” or otherwise different from the way women "should be."

However, this social cost does not occur in all areas. Professor Riley Bowles' least favorite question (that she loves to answer) is: does this mean that men should negotiate for women? The answer is a resounding no. In a study where men and women were asked to conduct pay negotiations both on their own behalf and on behalf of others, women were much more effective when advocating for someone else, and in this study vastly outperformed every other group. Men are not better negotiators in all circumstances—women do extraordinarily well on behalf of others, but run into difficult situations when dealing with ambiguity, self-advocacy, or negotiating for pay.

How should we navigate this social liability? Professor Riley Bowles suggests negotiating in ways that are relationship-oriented, so that negotiators are able to get what they want and deal with the social cost. Relational accounts – also known as the I/We Strategy—are one method of doing just that. Negotiators using the I/We Strategy employ legitimate explanations for what they want that are persuasive to their negotiating counterpart while signaling concern for organizational relationships. Rather than saying “I’m overworked and won’t be able to keep up if you don’t hire another person,” say, “This is a strategic opportunity for the company to grow in this area.” Focusing on win-wins and making legitimate concerns transparent are two key ways to reduce the social cost of negotiation.

In closing, Professor Riley Bowles asked us to each think of a current, anticipated, or desired career-related negotiation and to make specific, realistic goals for what we want to achieve. We each received a workbook to guide our preparation. Based on this research, to improve our outcomes we can work to reduce ambiguity and to employ an I/We Strategy. How do you plan to handle your next negotiation?

Iron Fist in a Velvet Glove: Gender/Professional Identity & Women's Negotiation Performance

Dr. Shira Mor, Assistant Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management in Erasmus University, presented her work on gender professional identity integration in today's HKS WAPPP Seminar. While introducing Dr. Mor, Professor Hannah Riley-Bowles noted that she "thinks about the practical at the individual level", meaning that her work aims to deliver insights that women can use in their individual lives. "My message is very positive, it's very rewarding to engage in this research", Dr. Mor commented.

The question that triggered her research was about what it means to integrate the feminine and the masculine side that all persons have within them. She recalled a description by Virginia Woolf of the two "important and resonant" powers inside us that are both, feminine and masculine, and mentioned that if integrated, could have incredibly creative outcomes. How to actually bridge these two identities is one of her main interests.

Virginia Woolf made it into the discussion
at the HKS WAPPP Seminar

Dr. Mor described a number of studies she has run to see the effect of gender/professional identity integration (GPII) on negotiation results for women. GPII refers to the degree to which any person feels like their gender identity fits in well with the professional role they perform, measured by self-reported responses to an eight item questionnaire. The questionnaire is administered most commonly to people whose gender is opposite to the dominant gender in their field, such as male nurses or female engineers. If a person reports that their gender identity interferes with their work or that they feel uncomfortable exhibiting certain gendered traits in a professional setting, they will score low on GPII. Conversely, people who see their gender identity as a professional resource will score high on GPII. Essentially, it is looking at how well people can integrate their feminine and male sides.

In the first study, Dr. Mor observed the results of a negotiations class exercise. Before the exercise began, the students were scored on GPII; female students tended to report lower GPII than males. The students conducted a simple negotiation simulation in which they would play either the buyer or the seller. After the negotiation, female students with high GPII achieved much better outcomes than female students with low GPII. In contrast, GPII had no effect on men's negotiation results.

Dr. Mor explains her methodology

In the second study, the research team brought in a group of women into a negotiation training environment and put them in a salary negotiation with a male actor who they believed to be a recruiter. The goal was to find out whether it was really GPII driving the effects or whether there were other personal traits that were producing the results. After the negotiations, high GPII women obtained higher starting salary offers regardless of other characteristics such as race. These negotiators tended to smile more frequently and have more open body postures than low GPII negotiators.

One of her next papers took this a step further and looked at whether GPII for women could be induced. Participants in the experiment were randomly assigned to one of three groups before the negotiation exercise. The first group was asked to list ways in which being female helped them professionally; the second listed ways in which being female negatively impacted them at work; the third was a control group who entered the negotiation without any prior activity. The research assistants who coded the responses found the negative experiences especially difficult to read, because they contained reports of a wide array of experiences like harassment, catcalling, among others.

The participants then answered the GPII questionnaire and conducted a negotiation. The study finds that participants who listed positive traits scored higher on GPII and obtained better outcomes from the negotiation. Commenting and referencing related research, professor Riley-Bowles mentioned GPII might not likely come from within but from an interaction with society. Also striking was the fact that results for those who listed negative aspects of their gender identity at work were very similar to the control group's, sadly suggesting that women's 'default' setting is to have low GPII. "It's sad to say that there is no real control condition", Dr. Mor said.

Dr. Mor is continuing this course of study to identify the struggles and challenges women face to hopefully be able to prescribe useful adaptive strategies to navigate around them. Follow her research to learn more.