Ladies, negotiate as well as Jennifer Lawrence!

By the age of 24, Jennifer Lawrence had already won an Oscar and had been named by “Time” as one of the hundred most influential people. Given his determination and his success, one would think that Jennifer Lawrence was also successful in its negotiations. But when Sony Pictures’ email system was hacked in 2014, she discovered, like the rest of the world, that she had been paid millions of dollars less than her fellow male co-stars for “American Hustle,” Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale.

Few women like to negotiate. One of the reasons why the idea of ​​negotiating can put us off is the fear of being judged for having asked, or for having asked too much. It’s not crazy. Sometimes our requests lead to negative consequences.

Women have fewer friends at work

Around the time that Jennifer Lawrence was negotiating her contract, Angelina Jolie was called a spoiled brat due to her contractual demands. We are sometimes called bitches when we seek or use power. We never accuse men of being authoritarian. That doesn’t mean we can’t ask for what we want. We should. It only means that there are sexist waves we will have to navigate through, such as the expectation that women should be warm and the tendency for people to feel offended when we say things outright, instead of putting our gloves on. whites.

When it comes to determining what to ask and how much to ask, and what their limits should be, women are disadvantaged. At least that’s true at work, where we usually have fewer friends than men. If Jennifer Lawrence had been closer to Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale, she might have been more comfortable asking, “Hey, what do they get you?” »

ask as much as men

When women set their negotiation goals as high as men do, they tend to fare just as well as men. This demonstrates that results depend much more on how much is asked than on how to ask, important as that may be.

When economist Nina Roussille analyzed data from thousands of job-seeking engineers on an online platform, she found that “the gender difference in asking salaries explains virtually all of the discrepancies in final offers. I find no evidence of discrimination against women. In fact, based on their CV characteristics, women receive slightly more offers than men, and depending on how the interview progresses, women are just as likely as men to receive a final offer.”

In other words, at least in this case, employers are willing to pay women as well as men, but we have to take responsibility for asking as much as men, as many times as it takes.

Women dare not ask

We’ve talked about situations where negotiations are already happening, but one of the biggest gender differences at this point is that women are much less likely than men to realize they can negotiate. . Numerous polls, field studies and experiments have led to the conclusion that the gender gap in negotiations is greater when the situation is ambiguous.

When marketing professor Deborah Small and her colleagues brought participants to the lab to play the word game Boggle, players were told they would be paid between three and ten dollars. At the end of the game, a researcher calculated the score, and handed them three dollars, saying, “Here are three dollars. Does it suit you? Everyone who asked for more received more money. They could get up to ten dollars if they asked. Only 3% of women asked for morewhile 23% of men did.

The year after Sony Pictures’ e-mail system was hacked, Jennifer Lawrence returned to the negotiating table, this time for a starring role in the movie “Passengers.” I don’t know what target salary she asked for, but I know the $20 million she negotiated made her Hollywood’s highest paid actressand I also know that she made 8 million more than her male co-star.