Michele Gelfand: evaluation

Transcript context

…Now, you’re well known for your work on negotiation. Why are women worse negotiators than men, if indeed they are? I don’t know where that comes from because meta analyses would say that when there are gender differences, they tend to be pretty small. That is to say that situational factors really do affect behavior and outcomes in negotiation a lot. So there’s not huge differences in gender. What I do find that differentiates women and men in general — but this is again delimiting it further: white women of a certain social class compared to white men — is that women are less likely to get to the negotiation table. We can think about putting people in a lab, having them negotiate, and studying their behavior, but we can think about who gets to the table in the first place. It’s what we call propensity to negotiate. We started this research program with Linda Babcock. She’s an economist at Carnegie Mellon. We can see that women actually are less likely to ask for things than men. Men get to the negotiation table more often. We’ve been studying that phenomenon, why it’s the case. It turns out, actually, there’s some kind of rationality to it. Other people have showed that when women do negotiate, when they do initiate negotiations, they tend to experience a lot of backlash. I would argue that that would apply to other forms of lower status, whether it’s social class or minority status. There is some sense that, if I do ask for more things, I’m going to get some negative feedback. Tightness. There’s a frequently communicated result — it may or may not be true — that women have a harder time asking for raises. Do you agree?…

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