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Published on August 22, 2007

A survey by Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, offers an entirely different explanation to sum up uneven payments, gender differences in negotiating promotions and pay rises, reports The Guardian newspaper in England.

Women workers these days are on a par with their male colleagues; some even dress up in no-nonsense denim to prove they can work as effectively and act as decisively as men.

Still, these women receive less pay. Babcock and her research team found that US women working full-time earned about 77 per cent of the salaries of men.

That figure does not take differing professions and education levels into account, but when such elements are factored in, women who work full-time and have never taken time off to have children still earn 11 per cent less than men with equivalent education and experience. But why?

One study showed that when it came to job negotiations, eight times more men than women asked for more money.

Another study asked students who were graduating with a master's and had received job offers if they had accepted the offered starting salary or had tried to get more. More than four times as many men - 51 per cent against 12.5 per cent of women - said they pushed for a better deal. Not surprisingly, those who did so tended to be rewarded, receiving 7.4 per cent more on average.

The traditional explanation for gender differences that Babcock found is that men were simply more aggressive. However, a new set of experiments by Babcock and Hannah Riley Bowles, who studies the psychology of organisations at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, offers a different explanation.

The study found that men and women get different responses when initiating pay talks. Although it may be true that women often hurt themselves by not trying to negotiate, this study found their reluctance to do so was based on an accurate view of how they were likely to be treated if they did. The perception was that women who asked for more were "less nice". "What we found across all the studies is that men were always less willing to work with a woman who had tried to negotiate than with a woman who did not," Bowles said.

Another experimental study featured a hypothetical job in which the volunteers were asked to decide if they would hire the candidates.

While both men and women were penalised for negotiating, the study found the negative effect for women was more than twice that for men.

In the final analysis, women don't always act different from their male counterparts. But women must weigh that against the social risks of negotiating.

Bowles said: "What we show is that those risks are higher for women than for men."

busdsk@nationgroup.com