
In 2006, Carnegie Mellon University professor Linda Babcock and her colleagues published research showing that women tend to initiate negotiations, particularly salary negotiations, significantly less often than men do. The findings appeared to at least partially explain the enduring pay gap between men and women. In the United States, the gap remained frustratingly stable from 2002 to 2023, with women earning about 80% to 82% of men’s compensation.
In a 2007 study, Harvard Kennedy School professor Hannah Riley Bowles, Babcock, and California State University professor Lei Lai found that evaluators penalized female job candidates who asked for higher pay, but not male candidates. Evaluators viewed women who asked for greater compensation less favorably than men who did so and were less interested in working with the women the future.
Women appeared to face a catch-22: If they asked for more, they risked being viewed negatively.
About 20 years have passed since research on gender differences in negotiation and tailored salary negotiation tips for women began to emerge. Have things changed? Yes and no. On the one hand, the results of a 2024 study suggest that many professional women are negotiating compensation much more assertively—even more assertively than men. Unfortunately, however, these efforts have failed to move the needle on the gender pay gap.
Women Do Ask
In their 2024 study, researchers Laura Kray (University of California, Berkeley), Jessica Kennedy (Vanderbilt Business School), and Margaret Lee (UC Berkeley) surveyed 990 graduates of a top U.S. business school between 2015 and 2019 about whether they negotiated the salary of their first post-MBA job. Contrary to expectations, women reported negotiating salary more often than men: 54% of women said they did, while 44% of men did. And in a survey of nearly 2,000 B-school alumni, Kray and colleagues found that 64% of women and 59% of men reported negotiating for promotions or higher compensation.
“While men reported higher negotiation propensity than women prior to the 21st century, the gender difference has grown neutral and then reversed since then,” the researchers write. Starting around 2007, when the message on gender and salary negotiations came out, both men and women—but especially women—began to negotiate compensation more frequently.
Nonetheless, recent female MBA graduates still earn less than their male peers: 88% of men’s earnings, a gap that widens to 63% after 10 years, report Kray, Kennedy, and Lee. This suggests that the gender pay gap may have another explanation.
“Our research shows that women are willing to do their part to close the gender pay gap,” says Kennedy. “Unfortunately, negotiating well isn’t enough to close the gender pay gap. It’s not the source of the problem.”
If Salary Negotiations Aren’t the Problem, What Is?
If differences in men and women negotiating salary isn’t the source of the gender pay gap, what is?
“Economic studies show that the gender wage gap is explained more by differences in men’s and women’s career trajectories than by how men and women are paid for the same work,” according to Bowles. “We will make faster progress toward closing the gender wage gap by getting more women into high-paying jobs than by negotiating a little more money in lower-paid occupations.”
Organizations should be able to speed up this process in several ways. One is to institute more equitable, flexible, and family-friendly policies and structures (from persuading people of all genders to take parental leave to creating more “substitutable work” that doesn’t require high earners to work grueling hours).
In addition, organizations can do more to reduce bias in hiring and promotion. “Employers should be paying in justifiable, transparent ways with equal pay for equal responsibilities,” says Kennedy.
In their research, Kray, Kennedy, and Lee found that when people believe the “women don’t ask for more” narrative, they are less likely to support laws and policies aimed at reducing bias in negotiation (such as recent U.S. laws that make it illegal to ask a candidate what they earned in the past, a question that advantages men).
It’s smart for all of us to proactively negotiate our compensation, benefits, and work roles throughout our careers. But workers can only do so much on their own. When organizational and government leaders hold outdated beliefs about gender and salary negotiations, those beliefs could keep them from implementing the changes that are most needed to level the playing field.
What other aspects of salary negotiations do you think deserve further study?