Whether it’s higher salaries, better career opportunities or more help at home, women aren’t getting the things they deserve because they’re just not asking.
So says the book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide(Princeton University Press) by Linda Babcock, the Heinz School’s James M. Walton Professor of Economics. Co-authored by Sara Laschever, the book investigates the gender divide surrounding negotiation, both at work and in the home. “Years ago I asked my dean why so many male graduate students were teaching their own courses whereas the female students were more often relegated to the role of assistant,” Babcock recalls. “He told me simply: ‘More men ask. The women just don’t ask.’ In the course of researching a National Science Foundation Grant, I found it to be true—women don’t ask.”
The book is impressing audiences nationwide. Jim Berrien, president and publisher of the Forbes Magazine Group says the book is a “must-read” for all executives, for not only “highlighting the problems of gender differences in negotiation but also in providing ways to begin fixing it. Example after example of the financial and emotional impacts make this issue extremely compelling.”
Humanitarian Teresa Heinz, chair of the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Heinz Family Philanthropies, called "Women Don't Ask" "an eye opener, a call to arms, and a plan for action; it is enlightening, unsettling, and, ultimately, inspiring."
