Women Negotiate Better for Themselves If They’re Told It’s OK to Do So

In an experiment, few women who applied for administrative-assistant jobs entered into negotiations about their wages, and of those who did, more negotiated them downward than upward, say Andreas Leibbrandt of Monash University in Australia and John A. List of the University of Chicago. For example, a typical comment from a female applicant was that the posted wage of $17.60 per hour “exceeds my expectations. I am willing to work for a minimum of $12.” But if the applicants were explicitly told that the wages were “negotiable,” more women negotiated them upward than downward, by a ratio of more than 3 to 1.