Why being pushy at work can cost women dear

By DAVID GARDNER

Last updated at 22:37 30 July 2007


Women who haggle for a better pay deal at work are more likely to be viewed as pushy and difficult than men making the same demands.

A study on sex and salaries found employers negotiating with women who ask for more perceive them as 'less nice'.

There was also a reluctance to work with females who had pushed for a better deal, but it made no difference to the treatment men got.

The findings come from research by Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at America's Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

She wanted to find out why women on average still earn less than men for doing the same job.

In the U.S. women working full-time earn around 77 per cent of the salaries of men in a similar role. The figure for Britain is even worse at 73 per cent. Professor Babcock says one reason for the gender discrepancy is that women are much less likely to push for pay raises or promotions.

In one test, male and female volunteers were asked to play a board game and told they would be paid anything between $3 to $10 for their time.

After playing the game they were all given $3 and asked if that was okay. Eight times more men than women asked for more money.

Another set of experiments carried out with Hannah Riley Bowles, from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, involved volunteers play-acting as job candidates.

They found women were much less likely to haggle for more pay when they believed they would be dealing with a man. Yet there was no significant difference between the sexes when they thought a woman would be making the decision.

But Professor Babcock challenged the traditional explanation that men are simply more aggressive and that women should be more assertive.

She argues that women's reluctance to haggle was based on the 'entirely reasonable and accurate view' of how they were likely to be treated if they were more confrontational.

'What we found across all studies is men were always less willing to work with a woman who had attempted to negotiate than with a woman who did not,' said her colleague Miss Bowles.

'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.'

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