Women Don't Ask continued

Years ago CMU's Linda Babcock wrote a book on her research findings on the negotiation differences between men and women - succintly how women negotiate less and the high cost they pay for it. The oft-quoted solution was for women to get trained at being more aggressive, and ask for more.

An article in the Washington Post follows up on her research with colleague Hannah Riley Bowles.

"What we found across all the studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not. They always preferred to work with a woman who stayed mum. But it made no difference to the men whether a guy had chosen to negotiate or not."

"This isn't about fixing the women," Bowles said. "It isn't about telling women, 'You need self-confidence or training.' They are responding to incentives within the social environment. The point of this paper is: Yes, there is an economic rationale to negotiate, but you have to weigh that against social risks of negotiating. What we show is those risks are higher for women than for men."

And Reuters contributes another story to continue painting this rosy picture. Now surely, none of us know of a company where anger and pounding on the table or one's chest can be viewed as positive actions.

Victoria Brescoll, a Yale post-doc, conducted three tests in which men and women recruited randomly watched videos of a job interview and were asked to rate the applicant's status and assign them a salary.

Participants conferred the most status on the man who said he was angry, the second most on the woman who said she was sad, slightly less on the man who said he was sad, and least of all by a sizable margin on the woman who said she was angry.

When status was factored into the roles,

"Participants rated the angry female CEO as significantly less competent than all of the other targets, including even the angry female trainee," Brescoll wrote. She said they viewed angry females as significantly more "out of control."