But the gender gap, it turns out, wasn’t quite due to a glass ceiling. Men and women received similar starting offers, and the discrepancy emerged by the time they signed their final offers. Upon closer inspection, Babcock discovered a dramatic difference between men and women in the willingness to ask for more money. More than half of the men—57 percent—tried to negotiate their starting salaries, compared with only 7 percent of the women. The men were more than eight times as likely to negotiate as the women. The students who did negotiate (mostly men) improved their salaries by an average of
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