Management Professor Provides Expertise on "Ask Gap" for BBC Worklife Article

Ask gaps have many culprits, but key among them is the devaluation of women relative to men, and employees of colour relative to whites. Often people internalise these expectations. It can be harder for women to accurately assess their value, says Semnani-Azad. This might lead women to accepting the first job or salary offer, while men are more likely to wait for higher offers to land.

Women may be apprehensive about coming across as greedy or pushy in negotiations, or about hiring managers withdrawing or lowballing offers. In contrast, “in general, men don’t put much thought into these things”, according to Semnani-Azad; men are also more likely to have inflated perceptions of their value. “Men are more comfortable asking, and they don’t need to worry about experiencing backlash.”

The double backlash means that it can be hard for women to ‘win’ at negotiating, no matter which tack they take. “If they’re too forceful or masculine, there’s a negative perception that they’re not collaborative, they’re not cooperative… But if they’re too nice and they’re collaborative or communal, then they’re perceived to be weak, or maybe not as competent,” explains Semnani-Azad. She’s experienced negotiation backlash herself, when it was clear that male hiring managers didn’t expect her to negotiate offers, and started downplaying her achievements in response. This kind of backlash affects women of colour in particular; black women are especially likely to be unfairly perceived as too aggressive in negotiating.

Women are not inherently or universally softer negotiators. For instance, there’s plenty of research showing that “women have been successful if they have been negotiating on behalf of someone else”, says Semnani-Azad. In other words, women are either more comfortable, or viewed more favourably, when they’re not negotiating for themselves – partly because of societal expectations that they be ‘nice’. Of course, there are differences in negotiation styles not only across race and gender, but other factors including nationality and sexuality.

Narrowing the ask gap 

One recruitment company tackling this disparity is New York City-based Hired, which is geared mainly toward employees in the tech sector. Because these workers’ skills are so in demand, they have more power than many low-skilled workers. For instance, on Hired, companies first approach prospective employees, rather than the other way around.

Like many job-search platforms, Hired used to leave a blank field for each applicant’s desired salary. But in 2018, the company started filling in that field with the median salary for the role, based on data from its users. This simple change eradicated the gender ask gap of 3.3% among Hired users, “mostly because women are asking for more, and slightly because men are asking for less”, says Nina Roussille, an economist at the London School of Economics, who carried out independent research using non-confidential data from Hired. Essentially, after the 2018 change, all of the applicants gained more information on their true value according to the market. This depended on factors like location, with the gender expectation gap being twice as large in London as in the San Francisco Bay Area.

In general, Hired says they are trying to remove the subjectivity from decisions about what salary to offer – on the employee’s side, but also the employer’s. Josh Brenner, Hired’s CEO, refers to this as “providing visibility and guidance”, which makes for a more efficient hiring process all around. For example, Hired sends out salary bias alerts to companies that are offering lower salaries than typical for that role and sector. Granted, not every company changes its tune in response; these alerts lead to changes in offer salaries 4.3% of the time. But when a salary adjustment occurs, it’s significant, averaging $20,000 (£14,000).

Ways forward

Clearly, more wage information is necessary, especially for people starting out in their careers. But it’s not sufficient for closing ask gaps.

For instance, Roussille’s research shows that a 2.5% final offer gap persists for Hispanics using Hired, even controlling for the asking salary. And when employees learn of salary gaps, race affects whether this will actually change. Hired’s data indicates that when white employees point out salary discrepancies, their pay is bumped up 28% of the time. For Hispanics, this happens in only 15% of cases.

What’s needed first is awareness of disparities in ask gaps – and what perpetuates them.

First, companies or governments can end the practice of basing salary offers on people’s previous salaries. “Women are coming in with a history of lower salaries usually. And so, this provides firms with an anchor for women that’s lower than the anchor for men for a given resume. And so that essentially perpetuates the gender gap,” explains Roussille. Positively, “there’s actually now in the US a number of states that banned salary history questions from employers. And there’s early evidence that this has helped reducing both the gender pay gap and the minority pay gap.”

"When white employees point out salary discrepancies, their pay is bumped up 28% of the time. For Hispanics, this happens in only 15% of cases"