According to the Pew Research Center, women earned 82 cents for each dollar earned by men in 2022, a pay gap that has persisted over time. In addition, in 2022, Black women earned 70% as much as white men, and Hispanic women earned only 65% of the wages of white men. Women, and particularly women of color, earn less than men in part because fields dominated by women (such as teaching and nursing) tend to pay less than those dominated by men (such as technology and management). But differences in how salary negotiations unfold for men and women vying for comparable jobs appear to be another contributor to the pay gap.
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In particular, the degree to which incoming employees feel comfortable asserting themselves in starting salary negotiations may depend on their gender. When women negotiate for higher salaries, they must behave contrary to deeply ingrained societal gender roles of women as passive, helpful, and accommodating. As a result, their requests often face a backlash: relative to men who ask for more, women are penalized financially, are considered less hirable and less likable, and are less likely to be promoted, research by Hannah Riley Bowles of the Harvard Kennedy School and her colleagues shows. Men, by contrast, generally can negotiate for higher pay without fearing a backlash because such behavior is consistent with the stereotype of men as assertive, bold, and self-interested.
Research suggests remedies organizations and their leaders can attempt to reduce the impact of racial and gender bias in salary negotiations.
Negotiation Biases and Bargaining While Black
In a 2019 study, University of Virginia professor Morela Hernandez and her team assigned 144 working adults of different races (50% white, 27% African American, 14.6% Asian, 6.3% Hispanic, and 2.1% other), as well as 74 undergraduate students of different races, to play either a job candidate or a hiring evaluator in a 15-minute negotiation simulation over a job with a salary range of $82,000–$90,000. After they negotiated, the participants answered questions that assessed their level of racial bias.
The study results showed that white and Black candidates were equally likely to try to negotiate salary. However, evaluators who scored high for racial bias believed that Black candidates had negotiated more often than white candidates. This false perception led them to penalize Black candidates for negotiating by granting fewer salary concessions. By contrast, evaluators who scored low on racial bias had more accurate perceptions of candidates’ negotiating frequency and granted more equitable salaries. The results confirm that overt racial bias remains a significant obstacle for African Americans in the job market.
When Race and Gender Intersect
In a 2018 study, Negin R. Toosi of California State University and her colleagues explored how race and gender intersect to influence job candidates’ assertiveness in salary negotiations. In particular, they compared the negotiating behavior of white and Asian Americans.
Toosi and her team asked 980 white and Asian American men and women to imagine they had received a job offer from a consulting firm with a salary range of $31,000 to $54,000. How much would they ask for? White men and Asian women specified higher first offers ($48,247 and $47,797 on average, respectively) than white women and Asian men ($46,341 and $46,436 on average, respectively). Participants who aimed lower were more fearful of being punished for asking for too much. White women participants seemed to fear this type of backlash, but Asian women did not.
The findings suggest that when people belong to more than one minority group (such as “woman” and “Asian”), they are at risk of being overlooked. This “intersectional invisibility” can have negative consequences, such as leading certain groups to be underrepresented in organizations. Yet it may also reduce one’s likelihood of being measured against racial or gender stereotypes and falling short. Asian women participants in this experiment may have intuited this outcome and aimed high as a result.
More broadly, the research shows that race and gender need to be considered in tandem to avoid simplistic conclusions about how salary negotiations will unfold.
Promote More Equitable Salary Negotiations
To reduce the impact of racial and gender biases in salary negotiations and employment negotiations more generally, organizational and societal changes are needed. Because negotiation biases spring from faulty intuition, reducing the role of snap judgments in the decision-making process can promote more equitable job negotiations.
In her book What Works: Gender Equality by Design, Harvard Kennedy School professor Iris Bohnet recommends requiring decision makers to conduct structured rather than unstructured interviews. Noting that unstructured interviews have proven to be very bad at predicting employee performance, Bohnet explains that managers can make more rational hiring decisions by asking all candidates the same list of predetermined questions in the same order, scoring them during the interview, and then carefully comparing and weighting their answers.
Organizations would also benefit from publicizing pay-grade ranges and requiring decision makers to compare the salaries of those with comparable jobs. In addition, leaders should instruct negotiators not to ask candidates how much they earned in the past. Because women and minorities tend to earn less than white men, the question can put them at a disadvantage and perpetuate the gender pay gap. In fact, it is now illegal in many U.S. states to ask employees about their salary history.
What strategies have you found to be helpful for reducing bias in salary negotiations?
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Has any research been done on, or consideration given to, job applicants using a strategy of educating interviewers in real time, e.g., sharing with them the data contained in this Daily Blog piece. It might involve first sharing with the interviewer one’s quandary – should I ask for what I believe I deserve or will such an ask engender a bad reaction based on implicit bias. The applicant would then share the data that validates the concern, and conclude with a statement that s/he doesn’t know what to do, adding that it would be unfortunate if the negotiation failed when it didn’t need to or if s/he ended up taking a lower-than-appropriate offer, if such were offered, and then resenting the process and perhaps not staying with the organization. My premise is that calling attention to the issue of implicit bias in an unemotional and non-judgmental way would cause the interviewer to become more self-aware and therefore less likely to inadvertently fall into the bias trap.
Informative update to articles on gender and race discrimination in the workplace. You may wish to add in a future piece the Article by Michael Z. Green, Negotiating Race in the Workplace after Trump, 35 Nego. J. No. 1, 195 (2019) and his piece, Negotiating While Black, in The Negotiator’s Desk Reference (2017).