 Dare to ask in front of others? Women initiating salary negotiationsYufei Ren, Lin Xiu and Amy B. Hietapelto Journal of Economic Psychology, 2022, vol. 92, issue C Abstract: Previous research has shown that gender pay differences in the labor market may be caused by women’s reluctance to initiate salary negotiations, which is often influenced by gender-related social norms and self-perceived gender identity. In the real world, others in work environments can know “who has asked.” In a laboratory experiment, we manipulated whether the decision to initiate salary negotiations was publicly observable. We found that in a context in which negotiation is not costly, women and men showed no difference in initiating salary negotiations. When asked to publicly express their willingness to negotiate salaries, a moderately lower number of women stepped up, an effect that was not significant for men. Furthermore, women tend to tie salary negotiation decisions to their self-perceived performance even when pay raises are not bound to performance. In contrast, men were not impacted by this factor. Keywords: Salary negotiation; Gender; Labor market; Public observability; Social norm (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:joepsy:v:92:y:2022:i:c:s0167487022000629 DOI: 10.1016/j.joep.2022.102550 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Psychology is currently edited by G. Antonides and D. Read More articles in Journal of Economic Psychology from Elsevier |
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