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More from the Breakfast Notes

She presented a couple of neat studies where women and men negotiated for themselves or for someone else. Turns out women negotiate better for others - much better! Check this url for some interesting statistics: http://www.womendontask.com/stats.html.

So why is it that women don't negotiate for themselves? Linda provides a host of reasons for that, and while she does place a caveat that her sampling was only in the west, I am confident that the findings will hold good most socio-cultural settings. Incidentally, her studies, not surprisingly revealed that women who negotiate are viewed as aggressive and perceived negatively - which may well be one reason why women are diffident when considering negotiating.

Towards the end of her talk she discussed strategies for negotiating, which I understand she has covered in depth in her second book - Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever. Briefly though, she suggests some obvious and not so obvious points. A key point was attitude/emotion when going in to a negotiation: since attitudes are contagious, go in with a positive one. Most importantly, since women are socialized into being good negotiators for others, and if you are more comfortable negotiating for someone else rather than yourself, pretend you are doing this for someone else! She had a neat slide where she said you should do a six week run at the "negotiation gym". Start easy and step it up until you start hearing a "no" - if you don't hear a no it means you aren't asking for enough! Fear of hearing a no is what stops us from asking. In fact if you hear a no, she recommends rather than walking away, ask why the answer is a no. Oh and the negotiation gym trick - well, practice it in situations outside the one you are really working towards!


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