Never Accept a First Offer

-- By SamanthaWishman - 17 May 2012

Negotiation is not a skill that has been honed by women for generations, and in some ways it is antithetical to traditional notions of femininity. However, negotiation is necessary to the lives women lead in the modern world.

Negotiating Salaries

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook, gave a now famous TED talk about female leadership today. The statistics show that while women have made tremendous strides, we continue to under-perform as true competitors at the top. As Sandberg explains, of the 190 heads of state in the world, only 9 are women; women comprise only 13% of all parliament members; and in the corporate sector, women occupy only 15-16% of top management levels, with numbers only heading in the wrong direction.

Sandberg argues that women continually underestimate their own abilities, that women are too often grateful instead of aggressive, and that women’s reluctance to assert ownership over their success must be directly related to the small number of women leaders worldwide. Most alarming to me as a young woman was this statistic: A study conducted over the last two years found that 57% of men negotiate their first salary out of college, while only 7% of women do. Furthermore, this 7% of women negotiate for 30% less money than men.

Before you start thinking that women don’t like money, I’m going to throw a few more ideas out there.

Changing Roles, Persistent Attitudes

Women are relatively new to money, so negotiation, unlike hair care, is not part of the female tradition. From priceless ladies’ menus to coverture, women have been socially and legally prevented from arguing over the bill for centuries. 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.

Today, women outpace men in the number of college and graduate school degrees received, they represent over half of the workforce, and nearly 40 percent of wives are the primary breadwinners. Even as women’s roles have evolved, traditional stereotypes and characteristics have persisted. This dissonance may have costs beyond lower wages.

In the bedroom, gender dynamics have changed dramatically in our recent history. At the beginning of the 20th century, almost all American women entered marriage as virgins, but at the beginning of the 21st century, over 75 percent of women have had sex by the age of 19. But sexual liberation isn’t easy. Today, 61% of sexually active college women say no when they mean yes, 90% of whom say no to avoid appearing promiscuous. One in five college women is the victim of rape or attempted rape. Often in cases of acquaintance rape, the question of guilt turns on whether or not the woman consented.

Negotiating Sex

The article “Negotiating Sex” by CUNY Law Dean Michelle Anderson begins with an anecdote about Adrienne, a thirteen-year-old girl who walks three miles to have a late-night rendezvous with a varsity basketball player named Mike. Once she arrives at his house, she regrets coming and panics. As Adrienne says, “I completely left my body” (101). They have sex and she never objects. After the incident, Adrienne has traumatic flashbacks and goes to therapy where she is unable to fully overcome the damage incurred that night.

Did Adrienne consent? She did according to the No Model, in which a man may assume consent unless the woman objects. She probably also consented under the Yes Model, which requires affirmative consent through words or actions. Anderson argues that both of these models are fundamentally problematic in light of studies that show women experience physical paralysis and mental dissociation when they are subjected to unwanted sexual encounters and that men consistently misread body language to infer affirmative consent. Instead of framing the issue as a question of consent, Anderson believes rape law should place an affirmative duty on both partners to request “information about another person’s desires and boundaries or an expression of one’s own with an invitation to respond" (123). First a meeting of the minds, then sex.

Anderson’s Negotiation Model identifies a conceptual flaw in how we currently look at rape. The notion of consent in traditional rape law treats women as acted upon. A man advances. A woman must decide: yes or no. Imagining sex this way puts the woman up against a wall, rather than treating her as an equal party with equal bargaining power. The Negotiation Model is a more progressive framework and the expectations created by this model may even change behavior.

However, the Negotiation Model is, in fact, created to protect women who don’t negotiate-- women, like Adrienne, who experience “mental dissociation and frozen fright” at the hands of a sexually aggressive man (106). The Negotiation Model is built to accommodate Adrienne’s fear by requiring a man to ask what a woman wants, which sounds ideal, if unlikely.

Requiring more from men and less from women is not the solution. Would we place an affirmative duty on employers to ask women if they want to make more money? Women shouldn’t expect men to inquire into their desires any more than they should expect employers to ask if they want higher salaries. Not because it wouldn’t be wonderful if they did, but in reality they often don’t. Negotiation requires asserting what one wants or doesn’t want especially when the other person isn’t looking out for your best interests.

So, how can women achieve more professionally and have less unwanted sex? Women can decide that the costs of complacent behavior are too high and the rewards of negotiating assertively are matters of right. We as a society can help women cultivate skills, like negotiation, that suit the professional and sexual lives they lead today. Then we can expect that they use them.

(Hi Eben, I'd like to keep editing. Thank you!)