The Fear Of A Backlash

In their experiment, Amanatullah and Morris had male and female college students engage in a simulated job negotiation. The participants were told to negotiate either their own starting salary or a friend's starting salary through five rounds of offers and counteroffers.

Before negotiating, only the women reported that they believed they might be punished if they were perceived as too "pushy" or "demanding." Further, this fear of backlash was unique to women negotiating their own salaries, as those negotiating for a friend did not anticipate social punishment for their behavior. Another negotiation study suggests that this fear held by women negotiating their own salaries is warranted: women and men alike penalized female job candidates who initiated salary negotiations, researchers found.

A Self-Protective Strategy

In Amanatullah and Morris' study, women who bargained on their own behalf opened with significantly lower counteroffers - about $7,000 less - compared to women who negotiated for a friend and men who negotiated for either another person or themselves. These women appeared to fear backlash for behaving contrary to stereotypes of women as accommodating and cooperative.

The results refute the theory that women are naturally less skilled or aggressive negotiators than men. Rather, the tendency of women to ask for less than men in certain settings may be a self-protective strategy based on a very real threat of facing penalties for behaving contrary to deeply ingrained gender expectations.

How To Fend Off A Backlash

The study results suggest several pieces of advice:

+ Connect to others. To close the gender gap and avoid a backlash when negotiating on their own behalf, women should try to relate aggressive demands to the needs of others, such as the organization's. Requests made on someone else's behalf are likely to be better received.
+ Stay vigilant. Both men and women need to audit their judgments for any subconscious tendency to view assertive women negotiators as unlikable and overly demanding.
+ Use objective measures. When making requests, women should reference relevant standards that would be difficult for the other side to ignore. In addition, organizations should attempt to control the insidious effects of gender stereotypes by instating salary benchmarks based on objective performance measures.

(Resource: "Negotiating Gender Roles: Gender Differences in Assertive Negotiating Are Mediated by Women's Fear of Backlash and Attenuated When Negotiating on Behalf of Others," by Emily T. Amanatullah and Michael W. Morris. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 98, 2010.)