Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide

  • 5h 10m
  • Linda Babcock, Sara Laschever
  • Princeton University Press
  • 2021

The groundbreaking classic that explores how women can and should negotiate for parity in their workplaces, homes, and beyond

When Linda Babcock wanted to know why male graduate students were teaching their own courses while female students were always assigned as assistants, her dean said: "More men ask. The women just don't ask." Drawing on psychology, sociology, economics, and organizational behavior as well as dozens of interviews with men and women in different fields and at all stages in their careers, Women Don't Ask explores how our institutions, child-rearing practices, and implicit assumptions discourage women from asking for the opportunities and resources that they have earned and deserve—perpetuating inequalities that are fundamentally unfair and economically unsound. Women Don't Ask tells women how to ask, and why they should.

About the Authors

Linda Babcock is James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University's H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management. Sara Laschever is a writer whose work has been published by the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Village Voice, Vogue, and other publications.

In this Book

  • Opportunity doesn't Always Knock
  • A Price Higher than Rubies
  • Nice Girls don't Ask
  • Scaring the Boys
  • Fear of Asking
  • Low Goals and Safe Targets
  • Just So Much and No More
  • The Female Advantage