From the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology:
The authors propose that gender differences in negotiations reflect women’s contextually contingent impression management strategies. They argue that the same behavior, bargaining assertively, is construed as congruent with female gender roles in some contexts yet incongruent in other contexts. Further, women take this contextual variation into account, adjusting their bargaining behavior to manage social impressions. A particularly important contextual variable is advocacy—whether bargaining on one’s own behalf versus on another’s behalf. In self-advocacy contexts, women anticipate that assertiveness will evoke incongruity evaluations, negative attributions, and subsequent “backlash”; hence, women hedge their assertiveness, using fewer competing tactics and obtaining lower outcomes. However, in other-advocacy contexts, women achieve better outcomes as they do not expect incongruity evaluations or engage in hedging. In a controlled laboratory experiment, the authors found that gender interacts with advocacy context in this way to determine negotiation style and outcomes. Additionally, process measures of anticipated attributions and backlash statistically mediated this interaction effect.
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Or to summarize, women are more assertive when sticking up for someone else than when sticking up for themselves, probably because they’re less likely to be viewed as disagreeable, unwomanly, abrasive, or “bitchy” when doing so.
Leave aside for a minute the entire debate on why this should be so, whether it can be changed, and if the world would be better off if women started acting more like men (or men started acting more like women). This research actually points to a rather nifty and relatively simple way a forward-looking company could reduce the role that differences in negotiating styles may play in the gender pay gap.
At the annual review, instead of negotiating themselves for a raise, each worker would instead select a trusted coworker to go in and negotiate on their behalf. They’d then return the favor for their coworker. If the research above is accurate, under those circumstances we’d expect mens’ and womens’ negotiating styles to converge.
And for workers who can’t find one colleague willing to speak passionately about the value of their contribution to the company? It seems to me this also creates a good way to identify who within an organization simply isn’t worth keeping around.
(Yes, I realize there could be principal agent and Prisoner’s Dilemma issues if employees believe that the overall pool of money devoted to employee compensation is fixed, such that more for others means less for them. However, this isn’t an issue if the salient factor is how much surplus value created is captured by employees versus management and/or shareholders. Feel free to discuss in the comments.)
