Gendered Career Negotiations: A Toolkit for Navigating, Bending, and Shaping Institutions

This week’s WAPPP seminar was the last of the year! It’s been an honor being your blogger this semester, and I’m looking forward to more cutting-edge gender research in these seminars next year. This week, WAPPP’s own Bobbi Thomason, Senior Fellow and Lecturer at Wharton, presented her work in collaboration with Hannah Riley Bowles and Julia Bear.

Current Literature Doesn’t Reflect Many Women’s Negotiation Experiences

We’ve spoken a lot this year about women’s career negotiations, focusing in particular on the effects of ambiguity and stereotypes on negotiation and the social cost of negotiating flexible work arrangements. However, much of the research on gender and negotiations doesn’t reflect the diversity of contexts in which women negotiate. Professor Thomason’s research group analyzed 43 studies on gender and career negotiation, and realized that the overwhelming number (70%) were lab studies, all of them talked about compensation while only some discussed job benefits or promotion, and 95% were negotiations with just one counterpart.

Because the literature is overwhelmingly on institutional topics and standard terms, like one’s starting salary, it’s unclear whether it generalizes to broader career topics that matter for women’s leadership positions and lifetime earnings. One other concern is that negotiating about money may be a gendered trigger. The “ideal worker” for most organizations is a male breadwinner with no outside commitments or distractions, who is understood to have a full-time caregiver at home. When women negotiate for a higher salary or bonus, it may go against stereotypes of how a female worker “should” act and elicit negative reactions.

Using Fieldwork to Build Lab-Testable Theories

Ideally, Professor Thomason explained, research is a combination of grounded theory building in the field – conducting interviews and observing people in the real world – which helps researchers construct hypotheses to test in the lab. Because the current understanding of gender and negotiations is so dominated by lab work on compensation, there is a significant opportunity to do qualitative fieldwork to better understand women’s lived experiences with negotiation.

In that vein, Professor Thomason presented three interrelated studies on the lived experiences of gender in career negotiations: a survey of 46 women, interviews with 49 male and female senior government officials, and a survey of workers in a large professional services firm.

Study 1: Understanding the Types of Negotiation

Professor Thomason’s research group surveyed women in corporate and entrepreneurial roles about their negotiation experiences and found three main types of negotiations. Institutional negotiations are standard requests, like asking for a raise. Institution bending negotiations are about creating a nonstandard work arrangement for an individual employee, like negotiating a flexible schedule. Institution shaping negotiations change the organization itself, often by creating a new role, program, or practice.

Study 2: Who Participates in Each Type of Negotiation, and What Do They Discuss?

In the second study, the research group examined a more institutionally constrained context, the US federal government. This study allowed the researchers to survey men and women and to test whether certain types of negotiations are easier in startups or other work settings that value flexibility and disruption. Each of the 49 interviewees shared stories of negotiating for their own and for others’ career advancement.

The researchers found that men in this sample did far more institutional negotiations and institution shaping negotiations. By contrast, women did significantly more institution bending negotiations for themselves than men did. (So much for the notion that women don't negotiate!) When negotiating for others, that gap disappears: men and women do about the same amount of institution bending and shaping negotiations for others, and men do more institutional negotiations for others than women.

Examining the topic of negotiations showed that compensation was a very small proportion of the issues discussed, in contrast to its disproportionate representation in most studies. Role negotiations were the most common topic – all of the institution shaping negotiations were about role, but role considerations were discussed in each of the three types. Notably, only women participated in institution bending negotiations for geographic and temporal flexibility.

Study 3: Understanding Gender and Leadership in Negotiation

The researchers interviewed 156 partners and senior partners in a professional services firm for the third study. Participants were asked about the frequency of certain types of career negotiation over their career at the firm and were prompted to recall and report on a recent career negotiation. At the end of the survey, participants were asked a series of questions to measure their “perceived freedom to negotiate.” The overall mean for the sample was a 4.7 on a 7 point scale – an “agree somewhat” that they feel free to negotiate career-related issues. There was no difference in perceived freedom to negotiate based on gender or leadership role, which is quite noteworthy!

Professor Thomason’s research group asked whether certain negotiation types are correlated with gender or leadership roles. Women (both partners and senior partners) report significantly more institution bending negotiations than men. However, there are no significant gender differences in institutional or institution shaping negotiations. Senior partners (those in leadership roles) report significantly more institution shaping negotiations, but leadership role is not significantly correlated with institutional or institution bending negotiations. In terms of topic, men report a much higher frequency of job-offer negotiations, like those regarding compensation, whereas women report a much higher frequency of workload and work-life flexibility negotiations.

In their interviews, there was no gender difference in ability to recall a recent negotiation, which refutes the assumption that “women don’t negotiate.” There was also no difference between partners and senior partners in recalling a recent negotiation, which indicates that everyone negotiates. The median length of reported negotiations was an extraordinary 90 days, which may present some obstacles to replicating real-life negotiations in a lab setting. Reported negotiations tend to be with more senior and “somewhat close” colleagues, and unlike most lab studies, most negotiations involve multiple counterparts. On average, 90% of men’s negotiation counterparts were also men, while only 13% of women’s negotiation counterparts were also women. There was no gender difference in satisfaction with the outcome, and 88% of the reported negotiations were resolved.

Opportunities for Future Research

This research provides important information about who negotiates, what negotiation type they employ, and the topic of negotiation that can be used to inform new theories and new lab experiments. However, Professor Thomason pointed out, these self-reports could be influenced by gender-appropriate narratives, which may obscure some of the reality of negotiations. It’s also unclear whether leaders conduct more institutional shaping negotiations because they are already in leadership roles or whether they use these negotiations to attain leadership roles. Future research is needed to test these propositions.

One of the key contributions of this work is examining women who have made it and women who have made it big. If the negotiation literature only focuses on barriers to women’s negotiation or the women who have failed to advance, it may inadvertently perpetuate the stereotype that women don’t negotiate or don’t negotiate well. Further research will help us develop a broader conceptualization of gender and career negotiations beyond “women don’t ask” to better understand how women wield negotiation to advance in their careers.

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.

Negotiating Across Gender: A Workshop

If you’ve ever found yourself in need of a better salary, a title that reflects your skill set, or a bigger staff to get the job done, then this week’s WAPPP seminar applies to you. Harvard Kennedy School Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and WAPPP Research Director Hannah Riley Bowles used the workshop to guide attendees through a research-based negotiations toolkit she recently created. Bowles argued that these main takeaways can help anyone - not just women - succeed in their professional negotiations.

1. Apply negotiations skills broadly. Bowles encouraged attendees to think about negotiation skills broadly, since academics and the media tend to focus too closely on salary negotiations. Through negotiation, employees can enhance their recognition and rewards (i.e. securing a new title or getting their name on research), seize opportunities to expand their authority (i.e. budget or who reports to them), overcome barriers, since more powerful employees are more prone to action, and make their work more personally meaningful.

The research: A recent Simmons CGO Survey of 364 female executives revealed that 80% of participants reported recent career negotiations. The most commonly cited opportunity that involved negotiations was seeking a new position or leadership opportunity, demonstrating that negotiating is about more than just salary.

2. Avoid ambiguity. Bowles encouraged attendees to consider the importance of ambiguity in negotiations. Research shows that ambiguity can lead to a heightened potential for gender-specific attributions, especially if the employees are operating in a gendered environment. There are two types of ambiguity at play here: norm ambiguity, or the degree of clarity about norms for appropriate negotiating behavior, and structural ambiguity, or the degree of clarity about zone of possible agreement and appropriate standards for agreement. When you provide employees with these standards, however, the gender gap disappears.

The research: A study that Bowles conducted on MBA graduate job market outcomes highlighted the power of ambiguity. Controlling for 30 variables that might otherwise explain the difference in income, Bowles found an overall gender gap of $5,000 (on an average salary of $100,000). In low ambiguity situations, such as investment banking and consulting, which comprised 70% of the sample, there was no gender gap difference. However, in high ambiguity situations, Bowles observed a 10% salary gap, leading to an average gender gap of $11,000 a year.

3. Be conscious of where you get your information. Bowles cautioned to make sure that our information search itself isn’t gendered, as we are likely to compare ourselves to those who are similar to us, therefore creating a self-perpetuating cycle. Since informal networks enhance access to information and advocacy channels, it’s important to reach outside of convenience networks to get information.

4. Watch out for stereotypes – both others’ and your own. There are several kinds of stereotypes in negotiation. Explicit and implicit biases might be more familiar to us; the former is easier to recognize and therefore avoid or correct, while the latter is harder to detect. There is also descriptive stereotyping (assumptions about what an individual will do) and prescriptive stereotyping (assumptions about what an individual should do). Bowles explained that self-advocacy violates society’s prescriptive stereotypes of feminine behavior, which in turn limits willingness to work with or hire the woman who violated that norm.

The research: Using a study of a fake resumes with a gender-neutral name, Bowles found that women who advocate for themselves are perceived much more negatively than women who advocate for others.

5. Enhance negotiations through relationships, and enhance relationships through negotiations. Bowles argued that explaining why what you’re asking for is legitimate in your employer's eyes will enhance your chances of getting what you’re asking for. In addition, signaling concern for your organizational relationships can mitigate the social cost of such negotiations. While some question whether teaching organizations to reward women who act relationally and don’t reward the women who don’t is helpful for women's professional prospects, Bowles asserted that the skills she encourages women to use are good practice for any employee facing a negotiation situation.

Hannah Riley Bowles on NBC's TODAY Show

This weekend, WAPPP research director, Hannah Riley Bowles appeared on NBC's TODAY Show to discuss Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella's comments about how women should not ask for a raise.

“It’s not really about asking for the raise, but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along.”

Hannah shares the research: that women are hesitant to ask for a raise in large part because of this type of social backlash. Until organizations and systems are fixed, women can overcome this bias by employing relational accounts when asking for a raise.

Watch Hannah's piece here:

Bargaining Power within Households: Can it Prevent HIV?

Over the last few months, we’ve been looking at how gender imparity has affected equity and efficiency in some very high-power spaces: politics, the corporate board, academia, and the STEM fields. But what about those more banal, day-to-day issues of gender imparity---those that most people don’t even see? Namely, how couples relate to one another. As commonplace as it might seem, relationship dynamics can have wide and profound consequences for society.

In the WAPPP seminar this week on “Intra-household bargaining power and HIV prevention,” WAPPP Fellow and PhD Candidate at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, Berit Gerritzen, looked at how married couples in rural Malawi approach issues of sexual health. Approximately 14.3 percent of the adult population of Malawi were living with HIV/AIDS in 2005, demonstrating the need for better information on its transmission.

And because many HIV infections throughout Sub-Saharan Africa take place during heterosexual intercourse between persons in stable couple relationships, the way that each of those partners approaches the other---and the issue itself---can be most telling for the diffusion of the virus.

Through data from the Malawi Diffusion and Ideational Change Project, Gerritzen looked at questions of (a) whether partners spoke about HIV risk, (b) accepted condom usage within marriage, (c) self-reported infidelity, among other issues including, of course, (d) HIV infection itself. Gerritzen cross-referenced those answers with indicators of household bargaining power, namely a spouse’s personal economic status, the number of wives in the family, local political participation, and other demographic data.

While conceding that there are a number of additional variables at play, Gerritzen concludes that factors associated with gains in female bargaining power---such as a wife’s own earnings and education, fewer co-wives, and political participation---are in fact generally related to increases in spousal discussions of sexual health, greater acceptance of condom use within marriage, and other HIV risk-reduction efforts.

When women demand the processes and outcomes that they know to be best for themselves, the household’s own welfare improves. And behaviors within the house are often what influence societal health outcomes, further strengthening the case that empowering women and increasing agency has benefits far beyond equality.



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Social Norms and Stereotypes: What Happens When Everyone's a Little Bit Sexist?

Upon seeing one of those “reuse your towel” cards in a hotel, have you ever wondered how many people were actually reusing their towels? An experimental study found that when the message was supplemented with information that “nearly 75 percent of hotel guests reuse their towels,” the guests receiving the message became more likely to reuse their towel than the guests who got the standard note. This is an example of the power of social norms – when the desired action is perceived as the norm, compliance increases. The same mechanism is at work in reverse for an undesirable behavior – people are less likely to litter when they perceive that only a few “anti-social types” litter.

Social norms are often more powerful than explicit messages. The signs in the Petrified Forest National Park used to read something like this: “Don’t take petrified wood, 14 tons a year are being stolen in small pieces.” That last part essentially signaled to the visitor: “everybody is doing it.” When that part was removed, compliance improved.

Now, let’s connect this information to racial and gender stereotyping and bias – generally, people view bias as undesirable and actively work against it. However, the 2000’s saw a growing body of research on unconscious biases. The notion that most people have unconscious stereotypes and biases captivated the popular press. The cover of the Washington Post Magazine on January 23, 2005 read: “Many Americans believe they are not prejudiced. Now a new test provides powerful evidence that a majority of us really are.” So, it’s like the song from Broadway musical Avenue Q, “Everyone's a Little Bit Racist.”
 
But what does that mean for social norms? Does knowing that everyone has unconscious biases make it seem permissible to let our own biases slide?

Those are the questions Melissa Thomas-Hunt, Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, set out to answer with her colleague Michelle Duguid, Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School. Thomas-Hunt and Duguid designed a series of creative experiments to test how messages of high and low prevalence of stereotyping affect behavior.
 
In one of the experiments, pairs of women and men were negotiating a car sale. All of the men were told to avoid thinking of others in a stereotypical manner. Some of the men were primed with a “high prevalence of stereotyping” message – they were not told what gender biases might be, just that an influential body of research finds that the majority of people do stereotype. Other men were primed with a “low prevalence” message – that very few people hold stereotypical misconceptions. Yet another set of men received a “high prevalence of counter stereotyping” message – that most people actively try to overcome biased misconceptions.

After the negotiation, the women, who did not know anything about these messages, were asked to rank their opponents' assertiveness. The researchers also compared negotiated price outcomes. The men who were told that most people stereotype, despite being cautioned not to do so themselves, consistently claimed more value in the negotiation and were ranked as more assertive by their female counterparts than were the men in both other groups. The division of value was more equitable in the pairs where men received “few people stereotype” and “most people work to avoid stereotyping.” The men were also perceived to be less assertive by their female counterparts. In other words, the men who perceived the social norm to be in line with stereotypes of women as weak negotiators were more likely to treat them as such, while the men who thought the social norm was to counter stereotypes treated their negotiating partners more equitably.

Thomas-Hunt’s and Duguid’s experiments point to the conclusion that it’s not enough to be aware that we have conscious and unconscious biases. We need social norms to counter these biases. We need a culture in which most people work hard not to stereotype. In companies, this could be a consistent internal message from the highest ranks, but in society it will take all of us holding each other accountable and working not to be even a little bit sexist.

Melissa Thomas-Hunt presented at a WAPPP Seminar titled, "Condoning Stereotyping: How Awareness of Stereotyping Prevalence Impacts Stereotype Expression in Negotiations and Beyond," on April 4, 2013.


Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.

The Silent Sex: Gender, Deliberation, and Institutions

Imagine for a moment that you are the head of a neighborhood council, a mayor organizing your city council meetings, or the president of a local worker's union. Though the mix of women and men in your group has started to even out over the years, you're finding that the official minutes of your meetings indicate otherwise. Men still make most of the comments on record, and file most of the motions. You're concerned that women's perspectives - and those of the women they represent - aren't being captured. What do you do?

Tali Mendelberg, Professor of Politics at Princeton University, discussed her research at yesterday's WAPPP Seminar that explores how gender gaps in representation affect women and men's voice and influence in small decision making bodies. Professor Mendelberg's research began with the hypothesis that there is a relationship between a group's decision rules, its gender balance, and the representation of women's voices.

By studying five-person School Boards, she found that the gender composition affects both the amount of time women speak, and the types of issues discussed. When there are at least three of five women in the body, it increases discussion of women's issues, or "care" issues, but only if the group makes decisions based on majority rule. If the group follows unanimous rule, where all five people must agree to pass the resolution, then women's issues are discussed more only when men outnumber women.

As for talk time, or discussion participation, women spoke significantly less than men UNTIL there were four women included in a five-member body. That's an 80% tipping point!

How was this measured? Professor Mendelberg and her team looked at the time men and women spent speaking in the group, and found that gender parity was only reached when women were the majority and the group followed majority rule. The group with unanimous rule found its gender parity declining as the number of women in the group increased. These findings carried over to the frequency at which "care" topics were discussed and the number of times women first mentioned these topics.

Professor Mendelberg's research into gender parity in group composition, both in body and voice, and how that impacts the group's decision making processes is a fascinating starting point. Meetings are the backbone of democracy. As more deliberative bodies -- boardrooms, neighborhood councils, even congressional commissions -- find themselves with an increasing number of women (or not!), they would be well served to consider the rules they follow to guide conversation and decision-making.

Further research could help indicate whether these findings carry over to dynamics of other minority groups: how does race, ethnicity, nationality, class, sexuality, or disability factor into deliberative processes? Our identities are multi-faceted, as are our proclivities to express ourselves and hold firm with our convictions and desired outcomes in diverse groups.  If you were that leader described in the opening of this post, what would you do? How would you incorporate the voices of minorities in your group, and assure that group decisions reflect their concerns? The research presented yesterday indicates that not only should you look at the composition of your group, but you should look to the rules that you follow, as well.  The rules that permit the highest integration of diverse views may shift, depending on the makeup of the group.



Valerie Kane is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School

Lie to Her

This may or may not come as a shock: people think that women are more trusting. Laura Kray, professor at the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, demonstrates that in negotiations such perception of women encourages people – men and women alike – to lie to their female counterparts much more than to males. So what can we do about it? Before we get there, let’s see how Professor Kray arrived at her conclusions.

First there was a survey that asked respondents to predict what kind of a negotiator either “Michael Taylor” or “Patricia Taylor” would be in a scenario where that hypothetical person was looking to buy the respondent’s car. With statistical significance, people whose buyer was “Patricia” were more likely to expect that she would be trusting, good-natured and well-intentioned. Those dealing with “Michael,” on the other hand, were more likely to expect that he would be hostile, aggressive, confident and skillful.  Well, how about that?

An attentive reader may say – but that’s because we’re talking about cars here, a stereotypically male subject. Fair enough. In her second study, Kray drew on three semesters of data from a negotiations exercise in an MBA program. In the exercise, students were either buyers or sellers of a property and all relevant facts were in the case itself, no outside expertise mattered. There was also an incentive for the buyers to deceive the seller with regard to intended property use, even though the buyer was also motivated by own reputation. Did the buyers lie?

Yes, yes they did! In their post-negotiation responses, buyers reported on their own truthfulness. Those who negotiated with a female seller were more likely to have lied. Similarly, the sellers were asked what their buyers had told them. Their responses were coded to show who was “lied to”, who was “misled” and who was “told the truth.” Consistently with the buyer self-reports, the women were more likely to be lied to, while the men were more likely to be told the truth. There was no difference among those who were misled.  By the way, the gender of the buyer did not matter – women were just as opportunistic with their fellow women as were the men.

Kray’s third study was a laboratory variation on the negotiation game. This time all the buyers were deceiving the sellers. Unbeknownst to the sellers, the buyers had instructions. This allowed Kray to see how the men and women reacted when they were, in fact, lied to. Women were worse at recognizing deceit, though it was tough for both men and women – 89 percent of women believed the buyers’ intentions, while 80 percent of men did. In addition, when the women asked questions to scrutinize the buyers’ claims, their trust increased. On the other hand, the men who probed the buyers became rightfully more skeptical.

So, ladies, we are likely targets of opportunistic lying. However, the awareness that Professor Kray’s studies bring give us a tool. As a woman currently taking a negotiations course, I will now be more vigilant. I’m not advocating for adoption of blanket distrust, but next time you get that hunch that the car salesman is ripping you off, you should look into it! 

Anya Malkov is an MPP2 at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.