Poster #186 - Negotiation in children: exploring developmental origins of the wage gap

• In Event: 3-106 - Poster Session 11
  In Poster Session: PS 11 Section - Sex, Gender

Integrative Statement

In the USA, there is an unfortunate yet pervasive gender gap in wages: women tend to make less than men for doing the same work. One prominent account for why this wage gap exists is that women and men negotiate differently. Specifically, women are less likely to initiate negotiations and ask for less in negotiations than men (Mazei, Hüffmeier, Freund, Stuhlmacher, & Bilke, 2015). However, we currently do not know whether differences in negotiation are the product of extensive experience or are more deeply rooted in development. Here we bring data from children to bear on this important question. Two hundred forty-one 4- to 9-year-olds participated in various lab tasks and were then given a chance to negotiate for a bonus with either a female or male experimenter. We investigated whether girls and boys differed in the number of bonus stickers they requested as a function of experimenter gender. If girls ask for less than boys with both experimenters, this would support the idea that women in general ask less when it comes to negotiations. If girls only ask for less than boys with the male experimenter, this would suggest that gender differences in negotiation are due to an interaction between a female negotiator and male evaluator and not a general tendency for women to ask for less in negotiations. We found that while girls and boys asked for the same number of stickers from the female experimenter, by age 8 girls asked for fewer stickers from the male experimenter than boys (GLM, experimenter gender x subject gender x age, β = 0.2139, p = 0.0498). Thus, gender differences in negotiation emerged only with the male experimenter and older children. In our ongoing work, we are addressing whether there are any behavioral differences between experimenters that could produce this effect. We are also analyzing data on a negotiation persistence measure to address whether girls and boys are differentially likely to continue asking for a relatively large bonus with a female or male experimenter. We predict that the persistence measure will reveal the same pattern of results as the original data: Older girls will persist less than boys in negotiations with the male experimenter but girls and boys will persist the same amount with a female experimenter. Our findings suggest that gender differences in negotiation emerge in middle childhood and are not the product of girls universally asking for less but rather the product of how girls are socialized to interact with a male evaluator.

Authors

• Sophie Arnold, Yale University
  Presenting Author

• Katherine McAuliffe, Boston College
  Non-Presenting Author