Are you sure? Let's begin by defining negotiation. I think the word means "getting to yes," the social process by which parties with differing interests reach mutually acceptable agreements. Women have been honing their skills in this process since before they were women, as acquaintance with chimpanzee politics or bonobo peacemaking will suggest. Any "traditional" souk, bazaar, marketplace, or piazza will show feminine persons engaged in plenty of negotiating.

Perhaps when you wrote this sentence you were thinking of particular kinds of women, or particular kinds of negotiating. Although I think what you really want is a different first paragraph, because this one is mushy and doesn't state your real idea, I do think a moment or two of thinking about what you were thinking of might be productive for other reasons.

However, negotiation is necessary to the lives women lead in the modern world.

See, this is the giveaway. You're talking about women of a certain class. You didn't see class, 'cause its invisible 'cause we don't have none of that around here.

Another reason for female timidity toward salary negotiation may be that from a young age, most women are taught to be complacent and agreeable, while most men are conditioned to be confrontational. After all, boys will be boys! When women hear a salary offer, however, they consent. The ladylike among us may even say thank you.

Maybe. Where are you getting your evidence from? I hire people, and I negotiate salaries with them. Some of them are negotiators, and some aren't. Of both sexes. And some people are bad at negotiating their own salaries but good at negotiating other transactions. I wouldn't put my experience up against some well-collected data. But you don't have any here.

The basis for the comparison is a little casual. With respect to sexual bargaining, it's true that the social expectations that shape our behavior are gender-specific: in heterosexual sex, men advance, women select. Perhaps this runs a trifle deeper, even, than social construction. Female sexual selection, after all, is the real subject of Darwin's Descent of Man, because—as Darwin tries to establish in his painstaking consilient fashion—female sexual selection is the primary form of natural selection that created Homo Sapiens.

There's no evolutionary significance to salary bargaining, however, and I don't generally take my sociology from Sheryl Sandberg, thank you very much. I think the reason women are still occupying a small sliver of the world's most powerful positions is that men stop them. I don't think the problem is that women aren't aggressive enough. Or that they don't have some other kind of necessary character. Male control of all the public levers of power was simply presumed throughout human society until one generation ago, when the Pill gave women practical control over fertility for the first time in human history. Men have not simply surrendered their control. Two generations from now, however, the most widespread social revolution in our history will have completed itself, from this rather narrow point of view.

In the meantime, you are arguing, I think, that women in our society should be given negotiation training. So should men. If we redesigned high school, which is always a good idea and which never happens, we would be well advised to try to get adolescents to learn some rudimentary negotiation skills. Of course, they would be poor learners. Adolescents are biologically and psychically in a poor position to learn skilful negotiation. The best time to teach people how to negotiate is, in fact, when they're young adults. Unfortunately, as you say, that's long after they've started having sex. But that's what negotiation training in high school is for. You think school boards in Texas, Kansas, and Iowa will sign right up?