Inducing gender/professional identity compatibility promotes women's compensation requests.

Shira Mor

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0207035

Abstract

In this paper, I examine whether inducing gender/professional identity compatibility prior to a self-advocacy negotiation, may enhance women’s assertiveness in a compensation negotiation and mitigate potential social backlash concerns for assertiveness. In two experimental lab studies where women negotiated with a male counterpart as sellers and job candidates, I found evidence supporting the causal link between state gender/profession identity integration and higher levels of assertiveness in women’s self-advocacy compensation negotiations.

Highlights

Gender inequalities in pay are at the forefront of international debate
Recent advancement in theory suggest that gender/profession identity integration- the perceived compatability between feminine-typical and professional typical behaviors- may be one factor that can explain variability in women’s inclination to display gender typical and professional typical behaviors
Since professional typical behaviors in the context of competitive bargaining are associated with masculine-typical behaviors such as high assertiveness, we would expect that women higher on identity integration will feel more uninhibited to display both feminine-types and professional-typed negotiation behaviors, an would be more likely to demand for higher economic outcomes when negotiating their own compensation

Summary

Introduction

Gender inequalities in pay are at the forefront of international debate. In 2014, the abrupt firing of Jill Abramson—the former executive editor of the New York Times—triggered a widespread debate about the negative consequences of high levels of assertiveness in self-advocacy negotiations among professional women (Covert, 2014 [1]). Since professional typical behaviors in the context of competitive bargaining are associated with masculine-typical behaviors such as high assertiveness (associated with backlash for professional women), we would expect that women higher on identity integration will feel more uninhibited to display both feminine-types and professional-typed negotiation (e.g. assertive) behaviors, an would be more likely to demand for higher economic outcomes when negotiating their own compensation Another related question is whether identity integration reduces women’s anticipated backlash, a factor identified to reduce women’s assertiveness in self-advocacy in negotiations (Amanatullah & Morris, 2010 [3]). Recent studies reveal that identity integration is a stable individual difference, and a psychological state that can shift when recalling past experiences associated with both social identities (Cheng & Lee, 2009 [13]; Cheng & Lee, 2013 [14]) Adapting this paradigm to a negotiation setting, we expected that inducing high identity integration in women prior to a competitive price and salary negotiation would increase women’s asking.

Materials and methods

Anticipated Backlash

Results

Discussion