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,

Stereotype threat affect women salary

What practical impact can stereotype threat have on our daily life? There are several, in this particular blog post I will explain how stereotype threat can cause implications for women, when it comes to negotiating a salary. But other implications includes such things that women scoring lower on math tests due to stereotype threat.

In this blog post I will try my best to explain this effect, the reason I would like to write about this is, as explained by Tellhed and Björklund in 2010: 

"our anticipation is that female negotiators can benefit from learning that stereotype threat causes sex differences in outcome goals, which in turn causes sex differences in salary requests. Hopefully, learning about the effect that stereotype threat has on negotiators outcome goals gives female negotiators a chance to resist stereotype threat effects, by consciously deciding upon a more challenging goal." 

Needless to say, this is my anticipation as well. So I will try explain this phenomenon in an adequate manner, because I am positive that information like this might help some women to gain better salaries.

Stereotype threat leads to lower salary requests
First of all, what is a stereotype threat? To put it easily one can explain stereotype threat as a scenario where you are risking the possibility to confirm a stereotype, and as a result of this threat the particular stereotype becomes real! That is, if women have a stereotype of being bad negotiators and/or have a stereotype that in turns make her a worse negotiator in cases where she is experiencing a stereotype threat.

This was tested in a study done in Sweden 2010. In this study the test subjects where divided into four groups, two with women and two with men. All four groups were presented with a test. The test was equal to all groups. They were to enter a room where they should negotiate their salary (with an hired actor). The difference between the groups was how the test was presented. Two groups (one with men and one with women) got clear instructions stating that this was a hard test, to test their ability to negotiate, wheres the other two groups got clear instructions the test was easy and would not test their ability to negotiate.

The reasoning here is that in the first group of women would perform worse, since there is women stereotypes that are considered negative in negotiating.

By stating that the test is about their ability to negotiate a stereotype threat is created. The results of the study clearly shows that a stereotype threat affects their ability to negotiate. Among the man and women who wasn't under the influence of a stereotype threat there was no difference in the result of the studies. But considering the men and women there was a difference wheres the women scored much worse at the negotiating.

If you look at the results more thoroughly you can clearly see that women that were affected by stereotype threat made a lower reservation salary (the minimum salary they would accept) before the negotiation. And having a low reservation salary is proven to be a major factor of how much the negotiator requests and what final outcome they get from the negotiation.

Real life implications
It is believed that this stereotype threat is present in a real life salary negotiation. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that one factor that determines women lower salaries are due to stereotype threat (but this is by far not the only factor). As suggested by the study from 2010 it is suggested that women in real life situations make a lower reservation salary and in turn requests a lower salary in salary negotiations. It is believed (but not proven) that by knowing this effect and consciously request a higher salary can help to combat this effect and in turn generate gender equal salaries.

But as I said before, this is not the only factor that determines women salary. Tellhed and Björklund states in their article that according to Bowles from 2007 "men were less willing to work with a woman who had asked for a higher compensation than what she was offered in a job interview. However, the willingness to work with a man was unaffected by whether he had asked for a higher compensation or not."

So, what science tells us is that if a woman faces salary negotiations in a job interview she is likely to request lower salary and be a worse negotiator than a man, this can be combated by all women by consciously requesting a higher salary. But if a woman would do so they are less likely to get the job because men are less willingly to work with a woman that does so. This can be considered proof that men and women both have to work for gender equality.

In my next blog post I will comment on Bowles study from 2007 and try to explain why men are less willingly to work with women that request higher salaries.

The majority of the source material in this blog post comes from "Stereotype threat in salary negotiations are mediated by reservation salary" written by Tellhed and Björklund 2010.