A common explanation for the gender pay gap is that men are far more likely to negotiate their salary as they climb the corporate hierarchy.  Of course, as with many such heuristics, it contains as much myth as truth.  Indeed, Harvard research from a couple of years ago found that women ask for pay rises just as often as their male colleagues, they just don’t actually get them as often.

A second study from Harvard goes some way towards explaining why that might be.  It suggests that the higher a women progress through the corporate hierarchy, the stronger the backlash against her if she chooses to negotiate her salary assertively.

The researchers analyzed data from over 2,500 negotiations, with the data revealing that women who negotiated often came away with either no deal at all, or a worse deal than they had originally been offered.  These results held even if the negotiating partner was a woman.

Negotiating penalty

The researchers believe that their findings illustrate the role negotiating dynamics are playing both in the shortage of women in leadership positions and also the damaging environment for women in the workplace that sees both assertiveness and conformity punished by a lack of progression.  It’s a situation that demands a change from how the negotiation process is played out.

“Something needs to be done at the organizational level to keep assertiveness from leading to this backlash in the first place,” they say. “I don’t think the idea should be to tell women, for example, not to lean in.”

The findings came after a few thousand volunteers were asked to participate in both virtual and face-to-face negotiation exercises.  The aim was to understand why women have consistently underperformed men in such situations in the past.

Best alternative offer

In most negotiation guides, the BATNA, or best alternative to a negotiated agreement is often key.  This is basically the fallback you have if the negotiation fails.  If you have a stronger BATNA, then you’re generally in a better negotiating position.  At least that’s the theory, but this wasn’t shown in the research.

Indeed, the data found that when a woman has such a strong alternative, such as a job offer from another organization, the likelihood that the negotiation will end in an impasse tripled.  The researchers suggest that the strong BATNA liberates the person to negotiate assertively as they know they’re in a strong position, but this appears to trigger a backlash from their negotiating partner.  This could potentially be due to subconscious biases about how women “should” behave.

“If you’re not assertive enough, you don’t get your desired outcome, and if you are assertive, you risk getting this backlash,” the researchers explain.

A worsening situation

What’s more, the situation only appears to worsen as women climb up the organizational hierarchy as the backlash appears to become stronger the higher they climb.

“This research lends further credence to the notion that it may be difficult for women to reach higher rank positions in organizations even though women may actually often practice advantageous leadership styles once they achieve these positions of higher rank,” the researchers say.

Indeed, the researchers believe that the fact that the negotiations were done in part in a classroom setting may have dampened this effect, with real-world negotiations likely to be much worse.

The researchers suggest that the best way for companies to overcome this inherent bias is to make key elements of the compensation package non-negotiable, especially in areas such as salary, which are usually those that contribute most to the pay gap.

“By allowing for negotiation, but putting some guardrails on that negotiation,” the researchers conclude, “I think that would be one way to try to close the gender gap as much as possible while still allowing many of the benefits of negotiation to come through.”