Nearly a decade ago, Carnegie Mellon University researchers surveyed a group of graduating college students and found just 7 percent of women said they had tried to negotiate their initial job offers, compared with a whopping 57 percent of men.
This negotiation gap appears to stubbornly persist among today’s young workers — though it’s less dramatic. The latest evidence comes from Earnest, a lending company in San Francisco, which recently asked 1,005 Americans nationwide, ages 18 to 44, about their approach to conversations about pay. Forty-two percent of men in the report’s youngest age group, 18 to 24, reported asking for more money, compared with just 26 percent of their female peers.
The chasm appears to close with age, at least in these data: Forty-three percent of women ages 25 to 34 said they negotiated a job offer, compared with only 35 percent of their male counterparts.
Negotiations, of course, don’t always yield favorable results. In Earnest’s 18-24 group, the men were more likely to have a “successful” negotiation compared to women, by a margin of 24 percent to 16 percent. In the 25 to 34 group, women were more likely to successfully bargain. Older men and women had about the same odds.
No matter the experience level, firms apparently shut down workers left and right.
Overall, the data show that it’s young women, perhaps in their first or second job, who shy away most from the negotiation process — a perplexing revelation, considering women are outpacing men in college enrollment and degree attainment.
So, what’s going on?
The Earnest survey didn’t elaborate on the meaning of “negotiate.” So, the women in the older age brackets may have found more success in asking for benefits like flexible schedules, rather than higher salaries.
In three 2006 experiments, subjects of both sexes were asked to think like hiring managers and evaluate mock job negotiations. They penalized women more than men for making extra demands. That happened whether they watched women negotiate on video or read about their efforts on paper. People found men who negotiated to be generally more persuasive, even if they followed the same script as female hopefuls.
An April study from Harvard Business School and Stanford University, meanwhile, found that always opting to negotiate a job offer, regardless of the circumstances, may backfire.
Researchers set up an experiment in which people playing “workers” and “firms” entered wage-setting discussions. They forced some women to negotiate every offer and gave others the choice to either accept the initial package or push for more. When women were forced to negotiate, their overall wages actually dropped. The rate by which final wages fell below the initial offer increased from 9 to 33 percent.
