This series opened with pretty dismal data on the gender pay gap and how women often don’t even enter the game i.e. they don’t even enter ‘the arena’ and attempt to negotiate pay and conditions of employment.
I have some very good news today and it is this -> woman outperform men in “representational negotiations”.i.e. negotiating for someone else.
All genders tend to negotiate to a “threshold of social backlash”. This ‘threshold’ is the point when we feel if we push harder it might damage our reputation or relationships, or whatever social capital we hold dear.
When negotiating for our own pay and conditions – women reach this threshold well before men, as shown on the left in the graph below.
But wait there is more …
When negotiating on behalf of others aka ‘representational negotiations’ men reach this threshold before we do. That is to say women stay in the arena longer we push harder, we do better in than men when we are negotiating not for ourselves but for others.
I am not sure why this is so exactly, the last group of women I spoke to on the topic told me that it is because women are nicer than men. I laughed, sorry men, however it is probably not that black and white. Let’s save that topic for a later post.
For now, I want to talk about how women can use this information to help them when negotiating. Of the course challenge here is when you are negotiate for yourself it is hard to use this information – you can hardly bring your mum or BFF to negotiate for you, can you?
However maybe you can play a little game and pretend you are negotiating for YOUR mother or BFF, what might you do differently?
Also for the many whose, negotiations are still collective, perhaps you might want to ensure your representative is a women.
Links and all that Jazz
The article discussed is from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2010.
Photo by rawpixel.com from Pexels
The threshold (to the left of the graph) is shown in dollars for the scenario covered in the research, the comparison is what matters here.
