By Melissa Korn and Daniel Akst

    The Journal and other publications have written about the gender-based wage gap and how women tend to shy away from salary negotiations.


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    But in cases where it’s unclear whether pay is up for discussion, men go ahead and try while women stand down.

    The study, written by Andreas Leibbrandt of Monash University in Australia and John A. List from University of Chicago, was based on about 2,400 responses to help-wanted ads for administrative assistants in nine U.S. cities. Some of the advertisements explicitly stated that wages were negotiable, while others left it more vague.

    The researchers found that women were 9% more likely than men to try negotiating when they had explicit permission to do so. Clear instructions that salary should be negotiated also made women more likely to apply to a job in the first place, cutting the gender gap in applications by 45%.

    When rules around salary demands were more ambiguous, though, men were 29% more likely to angle for a better deal.

    Men “prefer job environments where the ‘rules of wage determination’ are ambiguous,” Leibbrandt and List argue in the paper, nothing that those exact conditions tend to deter women.

    In a phone interview, Leibbrandt said that high-level jobs tend to be especially unclear about whether an applicant can push for a higher salary. He speculated that the lack of clarity may help explain the vast pay differences between men and women in those positions.

    Those who don’t negotiate are missing out, and big. The wage gap begins to form as early as one year out of college, according to a recent report from the American Association of University Women.

    Also worth a read: Our sibling blog Real Time Economics on how the wage gap may be smaller than many think.