Ask for It: Linda’s Blog

My daughter’s school invited me to give a talk to parents about why it is important to teach girls to negotiate (she goes to an all-girls K-12 school).   I talked a lot about the consequences for women later in life when they don’t negotiate—the lost opportunities at work, the impact on lifetime earnings, and how they may settle for an inequitable distribution of household work.  And so I argued that teaching girls to negotiate now will allow them to get a lot practice negotiating and they will be in a much better position to negotiate for themselves later as adults.

But there’s another really good reason to negotiate with your girls (or boys for that matter).  It reduces conflict in your household!  Because parents and children have different interests, different points of view, different time frames, different experiences, different schedules, different personalities, and different responsibilities, conflict will inevitably arise.  And negotiation is a great tool to manage this.  It also has the added benefit of leading to an increased understanding of your child and will teach your daughter how to be a problem solver. 

Let me give you an example of the benefits of girls being great negotiators.   For years I’ve been teaching my daughter to negotiate.  She has learned about the importance of asking for what you want, how to ask the right questions to learn about the other side’s wants and needs, and how to find outcomes that work for everybody.  When she went to kindergarten, I was faced with the situation for the first time of what she would do in the summer once school got out.  We went to a local shopping mall that was having a “camp fair” to find out about the day camps in the region.  We came upon one booth that was a “sleepover” horse camp for girls.  She got very excited to learn that such a thing existed and she begged me to let her go away for two weeks to ride horses.  My gut reaction was “absolutely not.”  Instead of crying or getting into an argument with me, she looked at me and said “I think I know what your concerns are.  You think I can’t handle it, don’t you?”  (I’m not kidding, she really said that.)  Of course, that was exactly the issue and I told her I was worried that she’d get homesick and would want to come home (and that she wouldn’t bathe, of course).   She asked me what it would take to convince me that she could actually handle it.  So together we designed a series of “tests”, such as spending the night and girls’ houses whom she didn’t know all that well, and if she passed all the tests she could go.  Of course, she passed them all with flying colors and off she went to camp for a week (we compromised on the issue of camp length).  She did great and she didn’t even want to come home (although she did come home smelling like a horse). 

I was really proud of how she had dealt with this negotiation and I think it bodes well for how she will be able to handle many different kinds of situations throughout her life.  And it stopped us from having a really big fight.  If she had reacted to my “absolutely not” by saying something like “that’s not fair”, we would have been stuck in a battle over positions (“Yes, I want to go to camp” versus “No, absolutely not) instead of a discussion over interests (“I really love horses and I think I’m old enough to handle it” versus “I’m worried about your happiness and being homesick”).  Good negotiators discuss interests and don’t get into fights about positions.  I’m glad my daughter reminded me of that!
Tune in next week to learn more about how to negotiate with your children (and check out Scott Brown’s book, “How to Negotiate with Kids”).

A friend recently sent me a link to an advice column on Monster.com where readers can post questions about negotiation and the “negotiation expert” answers them.  A woman, “Oolijan” wrote to the expert asking for advice.  (View the posting at http://career-advice.monster.com/salary-negotiation/finance/women/Entry-Level-Salary-Negotiation-Dile/home.aspx).   She is completing an internship at large accounting firm and received a full-time job offer.  She said the company is very anxious to hire her, she has received stellar evaluations, and the company is having a hard time finding qualified staff.  Plus, she is likely to receive an offer from another accounting firm as well.   A man she knows from her internship just started in the same position she’s considering and is being paid $2,000-$5,000 more than her offer (and he has fewer academic accomplishment than she has).  She asked the expert if she should negotiate her offer.  Monster.com’s expert wrote back the following:

“The Negotiation Expert responds: Take this job. Do not try to negotiate more just because it’s your impression that a guy got a couple of grand more — assuming that it’s really true and this guy isn’t just overstating the actual offer he received. If it’s true, my bet would be that other factors would explain the difference, not gender. How dumb would that be — a bunch of old guys sitting in a smoke-filled office saying, “Let’s offer ‘oolijan’ two grand less because she’s a female!” People are usually offered salaries based on how well their qualifications for the job match the job’s requirements. Take this job and prove what you can accomplish!”

Smoke shot out of my head when I read this.  Are you kidding me?  It’s wrong on so many levels.  First, negotiation is completely appropriate and expected in this situation.  Recruiters expect new hires to negotiate—that’s why they don’t offer them the absolute most they’d be willing to pay to attract them.  They leave a little “negotiating room” because they expect people to bargain a bit.  It’s standard practice, especially in large firms.  Second, in this situation, Oolijan has a lot of bargaining power.  The company really wants to hire her and she has strong evidence that they are willing to pay more.   So how can a negotiation “expert” not understand that Oolijan’s situation is tailor-made for negotiation?  Third, the “expert” depicts Oolijan as paranoid for thinking there might be any sort of gender bias at play.  Yet study after study provides evidence that some employers do discriminate against women.  This comment is malicious and way off the mark.  

Finally, to suggest that the only way that wage inequities occur is through blatant discrimination—men in a smoke-filled office deliberately paying women less—is ridiculous.  While deliberate discrimination of this type may be on its way out in this country, other, more subtle forms of bias are alive and well in our society.  A mountain research in psychology and economics  reveals that people can make negative judgments about women’s abilities, often without even realizing that they are doing so.  Let me give one startling example from my book, Ask For It (page 60):

“Judging the musical ability of a top-ranked musician auditioning for a symphony might seem pretty straight-forward.  Some people are clearly superior musicians and presumable any expert can tell the difference.  As it turns out, this is far from the case.  Two economists found that the use of a screen to hide the identity, and thus the gender, of auditioning musicians increased by a full 50% the probability that a woman would advance in the audition process.  Using a screen increased the likelihood that a woman would win an orchestra seat by 250 percent.”

It’s probably too pricey for Monster.com to hire the very best negotiation experts in the field to answer questions on their website.  But to employ a person who is perpetuating institutional discrimination and is so ignorant of the insidious ways in which some employers discriminate is just shameful. 

There’s a show on FOX called “House,” which I’ve been watching the season.  It centers on a brilliant but callous and antagonistic physician who diagnoses mysterious diseases that baffle his peers.  The story each week revolves around both “cracking the case” and the complex relationships Dr. House has with his team of interns.  It’s quite funny, sometimes a bit disgusting, and surprisingly related to my research.   Dr. House started the season with several dozen interns and the interns compete for a prize: a job with Dr. House.  One of the interns, Amber, Dr. House has named “cut-throat bitch.”   She’s smart, knows what she wants, and goes after it without reservation.  While Dr. House disparages them all in various ways, pointing out each person’s idiosyncratic weaknesses, Amber’s aggressiveness is judged her most noteworthy feature.  Yet many of the male interns are equally aggressive—they all really want the job and sometimes engage in ethically questionable tactics to win Dr. House’s favor.   They are “cut-throat” too but somehow this is normal and acceptable.  But Amber pays the ultimate price for being seen as too aggressive—she’s probably the best of the bunch but she gets fired.
Does this situation seem familiar to you?  It reminds me of how people respond to  Senator Hillary Clinton.  Commentators from across the country opine that she is too ambitious to be President (a Google search of “Hillary Clinton” and “too ambitious”  yields 624,000 hits, some of which are articles titled “Hillary Clinton is too ambitious to be President.”)  If that’s the case, we are in real trouble.  How can you set a goal of holding the (arguably) most powerful office in the world without being really really ambitious?  I mean, what could be more ambitious than that? To me it’s like saying the ocean is too wet—it just doesn’t make any sense.  But why doesn’t that also mean that men are also too ambitious to be President?  Yet I haven’t seen this argued about the male candidates running for President.  
Society uses a double standard to interpret the behavior of men and women and I believe that this is largely responsible for people’s reaction to Senator Clinton’s ambitiousness.  My research with Hannah Bowles (Harvard) and Lei Lai (Carnegie Mellon) clearly shows this double standard in a different context.  We had people watch video tapes of men and women initiating a salary negotiation.  The scripts used by the male and female actors were identical and showed the actors negotiating in a very direct and confident way.  People thought it was just fine for the man to negotiate but the women faced a much chillier reaction.  Observers thought the women were too aggressive and therefore not likable.  What’s particularly insidious about this finding is that people may not consciously realize that their judgments are influence by gender.  You may like or dislike Hillary Clinton’s ideas and policies.  That’s fine.  Let’s just be sure to we aren’t holding her to a different standard.  It’s high time we celebrate both men and women for being ambitious.
 

For a long time, I’ve been a vocal advocate for teaching women about the importance of negotiating to make sure that they’re paid fairly. I do a lot of this kind of teaching myself, and my new book (with Sara Laschever), Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want, is designed to help women teach themselves how to be bolder, more comfortable, and more skillful negotiators.

The good news is that women are not in this struggle alone. Last week, I addressed a breakfast meeting of female Minnesota State Legislators that had been convened by the Center on Women and Public Policy at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs. This week, I was interviewed by a reporter from the Congressional Quarterly Researcher. Both the female legislators and the reporter asked how government could help close the gap between men’s and women’s wages (women still make only 77 percent of what men earn annually). Here’s the surprising answer: Our federal government has actually been working quite hard on this issue. In 2007, two pieces of legislation were introduced in the U.S. congress that were specifically designed to help fight wage inequity, the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 1338 and S. 766) co-sponsored by Senator Hillary Clinton (D-New York) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Connecticut) and the Fair Pay Act (H.R. 21019 and S. 1087) co-sponsored by Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and Representative Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-DC). Both bills strengthen current laws that ban wage discrimination and ensure equal pay to workers in comparable jobs. The Paycheck Fairness Act also compels our government to be more proactive in preventing wage inequity, in part, by developing training programs to teach women and girls to negotiate. Now that’s music to my ears!

Learn more about these pieces of legislation and their current status by visiting the National Committee on Pay Equity http://www.pay-equity.org/index.html