Lifestyle

Women ask for raises as often as men, they just don’t get them

By now, we’re all well aware that the gender pay gap exists. The exact gap itself is hard to pinpoint but labor economists put it at around 10-20 percent — with the gap getting larger for women of color. For a long time, when discussing cause and effect, it’s been believed women are less assertive or willing to ask for salary increases than men. Thanks to the likes of Sheryl Sandberg, who have built a reputation by telling women we need to just “lean in” to get what we want at work — this narrative of women not asking for what we want is dominant in the gender pay gap discourse.

However, new research conducted by the Harvard Business Review may be about to change the way we understand the gender pay gap forever. Their research found that women do, in fact, “ask” for pay rises just as much as men, they’re just far less likely to “get” them.

A key difference between this research and prior studies done by management researchers and labor economists is that they recorded the information relating to people’s motivations, behavior and histories behind asking, or not asking, for a pay rise. They asked questions such as “Have you attempted to attain a better wage/salary for yourself since you commenced employment with this employer?”, “Were you successful?” and “Were you concerned about negative effects on your relationship with your manager/employer?”

Studying 4,600 randomly selected employees across 800 workplaces in Australia, the research looked at the culture of “asking” at work. They found that, when background factors were kept constant, women asked for pay rises just as often as men, but while men were successful in obtaining the pay rise 20 percent of the time, women were only successful 15 percent of the time. Not only this, but they also found that men are just as likely to be cautious in asking for a raise due to concern for damaging their relationships in the workplace as women. Fourteen percent of men and 14 percent of women reported as not asking for a raise because of these concerns.

They also found that there were a number of factors leading to these results. For example, if you’re older, or have worked at your company for longer, you’re more likely to ask for a raise. Education level did not affect the rate of asking. Interestingly, the most prominent aspect was age — younger women appeared as statistically indistinguishable from younger men, even when it came to “getting” the raise.

This indicates that we may be starting to see a generational shift, where the way we negotiate has started to change. Consider it the hope you need that we’re on the path to proper, positive change.

For now, however, it’s pretty bleak. Because if this research tells us anything, it’s that women do get treated differently to men in career negotiations and “asking” won’t automatically result in “getting.”