Do women dislike negotiation?

Are men and women socialized to pursue or avoid negotiation? This episode takes a look at the social factors influencing negotiation in this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop? Mom never told you?
From House to works dot Com. Hey there, and welcome
to the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. And Kristen,

(00:21):
I thought maybe today we could start the podcast with
a little dose of my personal pain from childhood. Always
a good way to start a podcast in my opinion. Okay, yeah,
I go for it. I love hearing your painful past stories.
All right, here you go. Here's one. This probably represents
the most embarrassed I ever was as an adolescent. Ever ever. Well, okay, shoot, okay,

(00:46):
So I'm sixteen, just got my driver's license. My dad's
taken me to the used car lot to find a car,
and we find one we like, and we go into
that little room that car salesmen taking into and they're
trying to make the deal. And I became mortified when
my father started haggling, because it's just I don't know,

(01:06):
I just thought that the car salesman would would get
a bad impression of us, and he was being so forceful,
and I just I was really upset by it that
I actually went and hit in the bathroom instead of
waiting for my my deal to be made. I was
just I was just so embarrassed that my father negotiated
at that car price. First of all, Molly, I find
it amazing that that is your most embarrassing story from

(01:26):
child is Well, I mean, I said at a lessons
but yeah, I mean I I was freaked out that
all of a sudden, we're getting in there, my dad's
yelling at some guy about numbers. Yeah, I mean, negotiation
is definitely an uncomfortable thing, especially for women. I find Yeah,
I mean it's it sounds pretty stereotypical. I O, women
don't like to negotiate. I don't like to negotiate. I like,

(01:48):
totally fit that stereotype. Well you're not the only one, Christen,
Oh my god. I mean, in addition to me, we've
got a whole host of statistics we can go over
about how women don't like to negotiate. And I was
so relieved to find that someone think about it the
way I do. They say they see it as going
to the dentist. Basically, men's negotiation is like a wrestling match,
a time to get down and dirty. And that's how

(02:09):
my dad was like when when we gotten in the car,
like drive it off a lot, my dad was like pumped,
he had adrenaline going through him. He was happy with
the dealing made. And you know, he just explained to me,
like the guy expects it, that's what we're supposed to do.
Whereas if it was you driving that cough a lot,
you probably would have been just shaking so relieved, like
ripping a band aid off or something, right, like I
just you know, get through it. And I would have

(02:29):
probably still been embarrassed about it. Even if I had
negotiated myself been like, oh gosh, he thinks I'm I'm
just an awful person. Right, Women sometimes they're socialized too,
you know, not be pushy like that. Negotiation I think
can feel just naturally uncomfortable because it goes against maybe
the types of things we were raised with, the types
of stereotypical behavior, you know that women were and were

(02:51):
not expected to do. You know, negotiation and haggling is
a man's job, so right, and it seems impolite. You know,
if you were raised a good then girl like me,
that's not within your manners to just start haggling, right,
and that kind of cultural factor could be one of
the reasons why of adult women say that they never
negotiate at all, even though they need know that they

(03:12):
need to write and this just you know, it may
say be faced for like a few minutes, but it
has very long ranging h financial implications in every aspect,
whether it's buying a car, negotiating your car price, negotiating
your first salary. It's it costs to not negotiate. Basically. Uh.
There was there's a real world example that I think
sums this up pretty well. There was one study um

(03:36):
in which men and women participants were told that if
they came and participated, they would earn between five and
twelve dollars. So at the end of the study, when
the women were leaving, the people who were conducting the
study said, oh, here you go, here's your five dollars,
and most of the women just took the five dollars,
whereas a lot of the men, once they were handed

(03:56):
five dollars, said whoa, whoa, wait a second, you said
that I could it up to twelve dollars. I would
like twelve dollars, And they actually negotiated their way up
to doubling and almost tripling. You know, bet initial five dollars. Right.
A little known fact of how I got christened to
you this podcast was I gave her five dollars instead
of twelve. Wait a second, and but here's the thing.

(04:18):
I mean, that's probably what people did when they got
their first job, you know. And maybe they were told
a range of salaries and when they got the bottom one,
they just took it. Whereas men are more inclined to
ask for more, right, men who negotiate their jobs are
usually able to increase their starting salaries by an average
of seven point five percent, or four thousand dollars. And

(04:39):
that is nothing to sneeze at. Four thousand dollars. That's
a down payment on something, right, And then are negotiating
initiating these negotiations about four times as much as women.
So you hear a lot about the gender pay gap.
You know, this is kind of what it made me
think of um. On average, according to you the Bureau

(04:59):
of Labor Satistics, women make about eighty percent of what
men usually make for the same job. But one interesting
study that kind of relates to all this is that
men starting salaries are usually about four thousand dollars higher
than women's on average, and if men were going in
there and negotiating for that some point four percent more

(05:21):
or about four thousand dollars, that could be one of
the areas where we're kind of shooting ourselves in the
foot and keeping that gap wide open. So basically, we
start off behind and then we can never catch up.
We're shooting ourselves in the foot and never catching up.
And to the tune of the fact that by the
time we're sixty, were five thousand dollars behind the men
and overall salary earnings. That sucks. Yes, it does. So

(05:44):
you know what, Molly, we gotta take back the power.
We gotta learn how to negotiate. Okay, I want five
or thousand dollars, and I want it now. Okay, I'm
not gonna get it now, but let's learn about how
negotiation works. Okay, there are three parts of negotiation. First,
recognize the conflict. All right, you want something, Say, all right,
your dad was a used car salesman. He wants a car,

(06:07):
and he wants it for cheaper. There's a conflict. Then
you stay your claims. Your dad, while you were hiding
in the bathroom, was probably telling the used car salesman
that he wanted the car for let's say, fifteen thousand
dollars instead of twenty dollars. He was stating his claim,
and then once they started haggling, at some point they
had to concede. They had to meet somewhere in the middle.

(06:28):
So maybe instead of buying the twenty tho dollar car
for fifteen thousand dollars, he paid, oh, seventeen thousand dollars.
So that, in a nutshell, is a negotiation, right. But
I was more worried about the people on the other
side of it, which was I was worried that the
seller wanted to make as much as possible, and I
was worried that, you know, um, the seller wanted more

(06:50):
money for the car. But what I was doing was
sort of ignoring the fact where I could, um, just
by you know, being interested in the car, I could
give him a benefit. He could sell a car that
day and you know, maybe get a commission, maybe just
meet a sales quota. And so that's I think a
key points to realize that there can be benefits in
the deal for everyone. You've just got to find them,

(07:12):
right And one of the first places that you should
start before you even walk into that sales room and
start haggling. If you gotta do your homework. If you've
got to know how much is let's say back to
the car. If you're buying a car, you have to
know how much it is actually worth in whatever specific
condition it's in, so that you can walk in there
knowing that they're probably inflating the price somewhat, and you

(07:34):
can have facts to back you up with, you know,
justifying your claims exactly. And the same thing if you're
you know, negotching your salary. And this one might be
a little bit harder because you've got to turn the
lens on yourself. You've got to know how much you
are worth. So that means before you even go in
for a job interview, you've got to know what other
people in this position are making. Um, you know what
kind of education background you're bringing to this, what your

(07:54):
skill sets are that are that are very you know,
defined and special to you because you have something to offer.
When we can go for jobs, we often think, oh, man,
I hope I get hired. I need a job. But
you have services that you were offering to them, and
that's what you've got. Our members, it's still a two
way street, just like buying a car exactly, and that's
all part of strategizing your approach. A lot of times
with negotiations, there are two approaches you can take. You

(08:16):
can take the more soft approach, which you would probably
use in a salary negotiation situation where you know you
don't want to UM anger your you know, potential new
boss by demanding to have some insanely high salary, so
you're probably gonna want to work with it and a
little bit more, be a little you know, a little gentler.
But then if you go to the car lot, you're
probably gonna want to take more of a hard approach.

(08:38):
You're gonna say, you know what, I'm only paying fifteen
thousand dollars for his car and you can take it
or leave it right. And I will say, since we
do have UM women's concerns that our forefront, Kristen, you
don't want to be too soft with the boss, though true,
because there are studies that show that women probably take
UM more of a softer appotion than they need to,
and they back down, whereas when men negotiate with their

(08:59):
future by says it's just business, they're able to separate
out that UM idea that they might offend the boss
and play hardball and then go have drinks with the
boss afterwards, whereas that's not something that women are as
comfortable doing. Now, Molly, that sounds like a certain negotiation
strategy that I've heard of called separating the people from

(09:19):
the problem, And I think that that strategy is the
number one things at least for me personally with negotiation
that I would have to keep in mind, right, it's
not personal right walking into negotiations, we might care a
little bit too much about how the other person is
going to perceive us, if we're going to come across
as hard nosed, be words who you know who, they're

(09:42):
just gonna bad mouth once we leave. We need to
get rid of all of that. If we've done our
homework and we have a strategy worked out, we need
to separate what people are going to think about us
from what we actually need to accomplish. And we need
to do is think about what they want. Because if
we get to the root of demands and not just
think about positions that people hold like boss and job applicant,

(10:03):
buy or seller, but if we get to what each
person wants and how they can benefit from things. Then
you can sort of make your demands so that they
seem reasonable. You know, you say, well, I have all
the special certification in X, so I think I should
get X more dollars. And if you approach it like that,
you can actually enlarge the pie if you will that

(10:26):
you're looking at small. Let's also think about let's think
about negotiation as a pie. All right, pizza pie. It
could be a pizza pie. I was thinking of a
blueberry pie. Excited about negotiation, I think it. So let's
think of a negotiation as a pepperoni pizza for Molly's sake.
And um, you know I want I want three quarters

(10:47):
of it, but you but you don't want to get
you only want to give you just a little bit
if you only want to give me one slice. So
they're but they're actually ways a negotiation that you can
enlarge the size of that pie. You can have a
pie and a l zone on the side. I know.
And that's called inventing options for mutual gain. And I
really like this concept of negotiation because it allows you

(11:09):
to think of as many options as possible so that
both parties can walk away satisfied. So going back to salary, negotiation.
If you can't take as much of a hard lined
approach with demanding you know, your fifty dollar salary, maybe
you would be more satisfied with stay forty dollars and

(11:30):
an extra week of vacation. You just expanded your pie,
so it's like getting a salad with the pizza, bread
sticks with the pizza. Yes, now I'm pretty distracted by
the pizza, but I also think that you know, despite
how much I love pizza, you've still got to be
objective about it at the end of the day. And
I'm not just going to settle for a pizza because

(11:52):
they're giving me a personal pan pizza even though they
know I love pizza. At the at the end of
the day, I'm going to keep my emotions in check
and be like, even though I love pizza, I'm not
going to settle for just this little amount of pizza
if it's not enough for me. You have to remember
how much power that you hold as a consumer, As
someone who you know has job talents or whatever it

(12:13):
is that you're negotiating for, You hold a lot of
power when you walk into a negotiation situation as long
as you do your homework right. So I guess the
message here for all women who find negotiation a little
bit scary is just to you know, do your homework right,
keep the emotions out of it right. And since that's
all easier said than done, why don't we end on

(12:34):
just a few more or really scary statistics. Kristen, Well
this one. If this does not convince you that you
need to start negotiating, I really don't know what will.
Because Molly, women who consistently negotiate their own salary earn
at least one million more dollars in their careers than
women who don't. A million dollars. Well, and do you

(12:55):
know how many pizzas that you can buy for a
lot of pizza? You can eat pizza every day. I'm
sold on negotiation. No more haggling for me, but for
with you. I mean I will haggle now in the
real world. Oh and by the way, I want twelve
dollars instead of five dollars for this podcast. We'll see
about that. Let's negotiate, Let's go get pizza. Well, if

(13:17):
you want to learn more about negotiation or other business topics,
you can read all about that on how stuff works
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(13:38):
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