Ask for it. Never underestimate the power of asking.
Linda C Babcock, Women Don’t ask: The high cost of avoiding negotiation and positive strategies for change
Women don’t ask. Even if we do ask, we don’t ask often enough. We seldom negotiate our starting salaries. We rarely, if ever, ask for raises, promotions, and better job opportunities. As in the workplace, so in our personal spaces. We seldom ask for help at home (and instead aspire for the impossible standards of the Superwoman syndrome).
The right to ask
Negotiating for our needs and expressing them appropriately in intimate relationships that characterize sexual agency in sexual and reproductive rights are taboo. So, we prefer not to ask. The consequences of “not asking”—not exercising our Right to ask and enabling our “negotiation voices” to be heard are enormous.
“I never stopped negotiating. Even today I do not stop negotiating. When we do not know when to say yes, and when to say no, it’s going to hurt us. Hurting is going to be more expensive than not even thinking about negotiating. Because if you don’t know how to negotiate, then the cost is very high. So, I learned how to negotiate. When you cannot define your personal space and the scope within which you would operate at work or home, then it is going to be extremely challenging to pursue a successful career,” says Srimathy Shivashankar, Corporate Vice President and Head, EdTech Business at HCL Technologies.
Although negotiation has long been recognized as a valuable workplace skill, the unfair associations of negotiation as a combative, competitive, and adversarial process have led to negotiation being seen in the realm of men in which they “naturally” excelled and by implication, women felt uncomfortable and therefore disengaged with the process of negotiation. However, over the years, backed by research, negotiation is increasingly being viewed as a collaborative process built on the win-win-win principle (how do I enrich myself, the other person, and the context?) that ensures equitable outcomes for all stakeholders in the process of negotiation.
However, paradoxically, we are negotiating all the time. For instance, making a decision such as how much to invest and spend; buying a house, or setting bedtime/screen time with children. Why, then as women professionals, we are so disconnected from negotiating purposefully in the workplace? In the challenging times, we lie in, where our personal and professional lives are constantly in a state of flux, a negotiation is no longer an option. It is an imperative strategy to enable our careers to survive, thrive, and flourish. Efficient negotiation skills nurture relationships, enable cohesion among teams, and are positively correlated with leadership.
The asking advantage
When Linda Babcock was the director of a Ph.D. program at a well-known university in the US, some of her women students shared with her that while their men classmates were independently teaching a course in the university, they continued as assistants to faculty. Concerned about the apparent gender discrimination, Babcock met with the dean who oversaw teaching assignments to discuss the complaint. His response was revealing.
“I try to find teaching opportunities for any student who approaches me with an idea for a course, her ability to teach, and a reasonable offer about what it would cost. More men ask. The women just don’t ask.”
Why women don’t ask
Gender stereotypes and the differential socialization of girls and boys imply that there are indeed significant social pressures that equate “asking” with masculinity and its opposite, compliance, docility, and acquiescent behavior with femininity. As a result, women are explicitly and implicitly discouraged from “asking” as much as boys and men do and even forget their right to “ask”!
This internalization of gender norms, together with women’s low sense of entitlement to “ask” for what they deserve are primary reasons why women, in most instances, do not negotiate their starting salaries. The impact of the inability to negotiate in this crucial instance has long-term impacts and repercussions on women’s careers in terms of pay disparities between women and men—a factor attributed to disparities in starting salaries rather than differences in raises. This leads to what sociologists term the” accumulation of disadvantage” where the difference in “asking propensity” of women and men inevitably lead to men being able to access more opportunities and resources than women. And interestingly, women, who have been socialized into being more other-directed than self-directed, find it easier to negotiate on behalf of other women than themselves!
It’s time we reframed negotiation as a gender-inclusive skill built on the foundation of relationships and collaboration.
“Until recently, research on negotiation has mostly ignored the issue of when and why people attempt to negotiate, focussing instead on tactics that are successful once negotiation I underway… With few exceptions, researchers have ignored the crucial fact that the most important step in any negotiation process must be deciding to negotiate in the first place,” writes Linda Babcock.
This element of choice, purposeful negotiation is the essence of intentional negotiation as a core career intentionality skill for women professionals. It involves engaging with negotiation as a skill set and mindset.
