Knowing When to Ask: The Cost of Leaning In

By Christine L. Exley, Muriel Niederle, Lise Vesterlund. Journal of Political Economy, 2020

123 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Women’s reluctance to negotiate is often used to explain the gender wage gap, popularizing the push for women to “lean in” and negotiate more. Examining an environment in which women achieve positive profits when they choose to negotiate, we find that increased negotiations are not helpful. Women know when to ask: they enter negotiations resulting in positive profits and avoid negotiations resulting in negative profits. While the findings are similar for men, we find no evidence that men are more adept than women at knowing when to ask. Thus, our results caution against a greater push for women to negotiate.

Subfields: Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0914ccf7e9001be948416aae569e2b2ee5c6e51d

Citations in the corpus

• Flexible Wages, Bargaining, and the Gender Gap (2020, unknown): “1 A body of evidence, mainly from laboratory settings, generally supports this hypothesis, finding that women avoid situations in which they have to negotiate or bargain (Babcock and Laschever, 2003; Dittrich et al., 2014; Exley et al., 2019).”