Women should speak up for equal payment! Or should they really?

In my previous blog post I wrote about how stereotypes can affect women to become worse at negotiating under the presence of a stereotype threat. And hopefully such knowledge can help women to regain equal rights in a work environment as men. But can the whole western world just trust women to fix the problem for themselves? Or do society and men have to work together with women to achieve this? These are hard questions to answer and certainly a subject where opinions take over actual truth, and by personal experience some men may resort to the fact that it is up to women to take the fight, not men.

The truth is that even if women did all they could to deserve the same job and salary as a man they may still get treated unjust, this is a scientifically proven fact . This blog post will briefly tell about a study how women stereotypes affect women negatively, similar to my latest blog post, the only difference being that in this study women are the victim of other people stereotypes, not their own stereotypes as is the case in my previous blog post.

Sometimes it does hurt to ask

In a study conducted Bowles from 2007 test subjects were led to take the role of an employer that is negotiating with a possible employee. The hypothesis sought to test here is whether or not we can see any systematical affect depending on the sex of the possible employee. Would a women experience negative consequences by using the same word, in a job interview, as a man?

The reasoning goes as follow; men and women should behave differently according to stereotypes. If a man or a woman should not act according to the stereotype this could have negative consequences (it might theoretically have positive consequences in other scenarios). As a woman is stereotyped as generally acting more nice and careful compared to a man it is reasoned that if a woman make it really clear that she is requesting a higher compensation, instead of just acting nice and agree to the offer she has been given, she will act outside of the stereotype. This will in turn affect the counterpart of the negotiation to believe that the woman is rude, and will be less willing to work with the woman, while the same thing would not happen if a man asked for higher salary as he is acting according to a stereotype.

Bowles conducted four experiments to test this stereotype. I will focus on number 2 and 3 of these studies. In test number 2 test subjects were presented with a transcript of a job interview. They had to read what the interviewed said and later rated what they thought about the interviewed and how willing they were to work with this person. The text they received were presented as either said by a man or a woman, but the text it self was identical in both cases. The interviewed either asked for a higher compensation or did not ask for a higher compensation. From the results it was clear that if the interviewed asked for a higher salary the interviewed was considered less nice and more demanding. But if the interviewed was a man there was no great difference in willingness to work with the person, but if it was a woman the willingness to work with the person was greatly reduced.

The conclusion is that if a woman demands more in a job interview she is treated differently than a man. And in this scenario she would be less likely to get the job at all, therefore it might actually do more harm than good for a woman to ask for higher salary.

Now you might think "Hey, this test was only when reading a paper, is this really accurate?". Well, Bowles thought that as well. So in test number 3 the same test was repeated. But this time they recorded videos of men and women doing saying the same text as in the previous test. The test subjects watched the videos and rated the person in the video in a similar fashion to the previous test.

The results here was even more precise, but unlike the previous test we could see a difference whether or not the test subject was a woman or not. From this test we could see that if a man asked a man for higher compensation in a job interview there was no significant difference whether or not they would receive the job. But if a woman asked a man for higher compensation she was less likely to get the job. If a man or a woman asked for higher compensation from a woman they were both less likely to receive the job.

The results concludes that a man or a woman that asks for higher compensation from a woman and woman asking for higher compensation from a man, where all considered less nice and more demanding, and as a result they were less likely to receive a job. But if a man asked a man for higher compensation they was just as likely to receive a job.

Conclusion

Gender inequality can not be solved simply be women asking for higher salary as a man would. Because a man will receive the advantage of doing so. While there may be major differences in negotiation skills between gender, it is clear that by using the exact same words when asking for higher salary the negative effects are greater for women. For women to get an equal pay employers will need to learn of this effect and take action against it. But the problem is that we can not tell how an employer effectively takes action against this without starting to discriminate men instead. But the first step to defeat this inequality is to know about its existence. So spread the word and make sure that both men and women knows about this. As to my question in the beginning, men and women need to work together for a fair treatment on workplaces, women can't do it on their own if they get treated this way.

Reference:

Bowles, H. R., Babcock, L. & Lai, L. (2007). Social incentives for gen-
der differences in the propensity to initiate negotiations: Sometimes it
does hurt to ask. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Pro-
cesses, 103, 84–103.

The referred article can be reached Here,