Linda Babcock, author of the groundbreaking book on negotiation and gender–Women Don't Ask reminds us that we are still taught that "competing against a man can threaten his … masculinity," making the use of "hard ball" negotiation tactics by women taboo.
Nearly all the women in their 20's who were interviewed for "Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide" (Princeton University Press, 2003) said that their negotiating skills had set them apart from older generations of working women.
Linda Babcock, the author of the seminal book Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, points out that executives who negotiated their first salaries out of college stood to make over $500,000 more over their working lives than those who did not.
But, for now, any negotiation in which gender is involved remains a careful, precarious balancing act.
"We have found that if a man and a woman both attempt to negotiate for higher pay, people find a woman who does this, compared to one who does not, significantly less attractive," said Hannah Riley Bowles, an associate professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, who has conducted numerous studies on gender, negotiation and leadership.
Then I read the cornerstone Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever.
What that means, according to Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Princeton University Press, 2003) by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, is that women lose nearly $500,000 by age 60 due to fear of salary negotiations, while 20 percent never negotiate at all.
The following recommendations are adapted from Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, coauthors of Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide.
It is the borderland, that symbolic middle ground between two cultures, which "offers a space where such a negotiation with fixed gender ideals is at least possible".
In Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever, the authors show that women negotiate 30percentt less often then men and when we do, we ask for up to $16,000 less.
