Negotiate for Yourself

Negotiation is a hot topic today. We read about “win-win” and “getting to yes.” So it’s not surprising that when I spoke to CEO of Arby’s Restaurant Group Hala Moddelmog, she said the biggest piece of advice she can give younger women is to negotiate—not just for their companies but for themselves.

“I was naïve earlier in my career,” admits Hala. “I had a nice salary and bonus. But I wish I had negotiated harder on the equity side. The men certainly knew how to do that.” There are many books and articles that compare men, women and negotiating. Studies show men initiate negotiations four to eight times more frequently than women do, twenty percent of women don’t negotiate at all, and when women do ask, we ask for less.

But let me add a slight spin to this. Women are good at negotiating for their companies or for others. That soccer mom? She’ll make sure her daughter has a spot on the team. The saleswoman? She’ll negotiate great terms for the company. The difference in negotiation between women and men is men are better at negotiating for themselves. They are more apt to ask for the raise, the bonus, the spot on the high-visibility project or the better office space. Women often gratefully accept what is handed to them.

This ability to negotiate and ask for what you want is the central theme for authors Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever’s book Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. They argue that women often don’t get what they want—and deserve—because they don’t ask for it. In three separate studies, they found men are more likely than women to negotiate for themselves.
For many men, the workplace is one giant opportunity to negotiate—for anything and everything. To them, nothing is not negotiable. Most women, on the other hand, have a much more limited view of what is negotiable. Think for a minute about what you think is negotiable and what is not? Opportunities are missed for lots of reasons, but you have to play in order to have a chance at winning.

“Sometimes, confronted with what seems to be a final decision, it’s easy to forget that no decision is final until it is accepted. When you accept that no as the end of the conversation, you foreclose on the possibility of negotiating through the problem,” write Deborah Kolb and Judith Williams in their book The Shadow Negotiation. Women have to learn to take the risk of putting themselves “out there.”

I will leave you with this fact: studies have shown that a woman who negotiates her salary increases will earn over $1 million more by the time she retires than one who doesn’t. Isn’t that reason enough to start negotiating more…for yourself?

By Erin Wolf