We are in 2015. Actress Jennifer Lawrence, revealed by the saga Hunger Games and interprets the unpredictable Rosalyn in the film American Bluff (2013), takes up the pen for the trendy feminist newsletter of Lena Dunham, creator of the series Girls. The actress returns to the discovery, thanks to the historic hacking of Sony Pictures data in 2014, of the fact that her male playmates in American Bluff, Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale, were in fact much better paid than her. “I wasn’t angry with Sony,” she wrote. “I was angry with myself. I had failed as a negotiator because I had given up too soon.” At the time, certain commentators interpreted the episode as a blatant illustration of what many works have tirelessly repeated for decades: namely that salary inequalities between men and women can be explained in particular by the fact that these The latter “wouldn’t dare ask”.
Back to the bestseller Women don’t ask: Negotiation and the gender divide (2003) or the no less well known Lean In, by businesswoman Sheryl Sandberg (2013), three researchers postulate in a study entitled “Now, women do ask: a call to update beliefs about the gender pay gap” (published in the journal Academy of Management Discoveries2023) that this idea would simply no longer be relevant… At least, in reality. Because in the collective imagination, the belief remains. Laura J. Kray, Margaret Lee (University of California) and Jessica A. Kennedy (Vanderbilt University), asked a group of several hundred nationally representative individuals to estimate the share of women and men from from an MBA program (Master of Business Administration, a degree in the field of management and business management) who would have negotiated their job offer. On average, the group thought 64% of men had done this, compared to 47% of women. Laura J. Kray and her co-authors then examined the real propensity of women and men with an MBA who actually negotiated, looking at questionnaires administered to 990 recent graduates (between 2015 and 2019) by a university administration . Result: 54% of women said they had negotiated compared to… 44% of men. According to the researchers, “it is possible that popular messages over the past two decades encouraging women to be more assertive have helped to close, or even reverse, historical gender gaps in propensity to negotiate.”
Pay inequality
Women ask, but do women get their way? According to a survey of more than 2,000 MBA alumni highlighted in the study, women were more likely to say they had asked for more compensation than men, but they were also more likely to say that the negotiations had ended in failure.
Should we understand that women actually fail more than men, or are they simply more inclined than the latter to recognize a failure… The fact remains that salary inequalities remain. As the researchers point out, studies of holders of a master’s degree in business administration have shown that women earn 88% of what men earn after obtaining their diploma, and only 63% ten years later. Laura J. Kray, however, admits to L’Express that she has not studied whether the results of the study (namely that women negotiate more than men) vary according to different professional sectors.
But the work of the three researchers is nevertheless enlightening in more than one way. These attempted to provide an estimate of when women actually began to negotiate more than men through a meta-analysis. Which, surprisingly, would not be very recent. “It is possible that the difference between the sexes disappeared around 1994, then reversed from 2007, and this trend seems to have continued to increase since then,” write the authors. In other words: if, in the past, men were able to report a greater propensity to negotiate than women, the trend would have been reversed well before the publication of numerous bestsellers validating the model of “women don’t ask (women don’t ask).
According to the researchers, continuing to support this idea would therefore not only be inaccurate but also harmful, in particular because it increases gender stereotypes, “even concerning aspects unrelated to negotiation”. “The positive stereotype of male negotiators legitimizes their success, seen as well-deserved and justified. The negative stereotype of female negotiators suggests that they deserve what happens to them,” they write. The latest experiments carried out for this study also suggest that the erroneous perception that women negotiate less than men contributes to a greater justification of the system, as well as to weaker support for legislation for pay equity. “Women appear willing to do their part to close the gap [avec les hommes]given that more and more of them are starting negotiations, but this is not enough”, conclude the authors. Encouraging researchers and society in general to “think differently about the levers which could have a significant impact on the ‘pay gap between men and women’…