This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Michele Gelfand has studied and taught negotiation for years. A professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business, she sees negotiation as a skill that is imperative for everyone to learn.
"It's not something we're born with," she says. "It's something we learn over time." Increasingly, she's been curious about how factors like gender and class affect who feels empowered to advocate for themselves. In a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences co-authored with Ying Lin of Hong Kong University and Jackson Liu of MIT's Sloan School of Management, Gelfand finds that people from lower socioeconomic classes are not only less likely to negotiate their salaries but also more likely to be punished if they do ask for more money.
"This study is showing not only that there is a difference in who gets to the negotiating table, but also that when they do negotiate, there seems to be more backlash," she says. Gelfand wondered if differences in people's willingness to negotiate emerge along class lines. She also wondered whether lower-class people's fears of backlash are justified.
To investigate these questions, she and her colleagues conducted five studies with different methodologies. The first study examined data from more than 7,800 Australian workers. Using education as a proxy for class, the researchers found that lower-class employees were less likely to report that they negotiated their salaries, even when controlling for many factors.
This difference mattered: Those who negotiated ended up with higher wages. Recognizing that education isn't a perfect indicator of class because workers may have had specialized skills or training, the researchers then set up a negotiation study with more than 600 recent MBA graduates from a top U.S. business school. All students came in with the same skills, but their parents' educational attainment was used as a proxy for class.
Although all the graduates received the same education and professional training, lower-class graduates were more likely to accept the salary they were given. Many said they didn't negotiate because they didn't want to "damage this new relationship." Upper-class graduates generally negotiated only a slight pay bump—about $6,450 higher than their fellow alums. It's not a lot, but over the next four decades, that difference compounds.
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