Studies have shown a persistent gender gap when it comes to wages— disparities that stretch over decades. Past analyses have pointed to various causes for this discrepancy, but often overlooked is how such divides may surface early in life.
In a related new study of boys and girls, a team of psychology researchers has found that despite holding similar views on the purpose and value of negotiation, boys ask for bigger bonuses than girls do for completing the same work. The findings, reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, indicate that these outcomes are linked, in part, to differences in perceptions of abilities: in a series of cognitive tasks, boys had a higher opinion of their abilities and therefore asked for higher bonuses—even though they performed no better than girls did in these tasks.
"Our findings suggest that boys tend to overestimate their abilities compared to girls—and relative to their actual performance," says Sophie Arnold, a New York University doctoral student and the lead author of the paper. "This inflated self-perception may lead boys to feel more entitled to push the boundaries during negotiations."
"These findings offer new perspectives on the possible origins of negotiation disparities that exist between adult men and women in professional settings," concludes NYU Psychology Professor Andrei Cimpian, the paper's senior author.
The research, which also included Katherine McAuliffe, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, consisted of a series of three experiments. The first two of these were used to ascertain if boys and girls had similar perceptions of negotiation.
In a pair of hypothetical scenarios, boys and girls—aged six to nine—were introduced to situations in which they could negotiate a bonus with a teacher for completing classroom work or with a neighbor for completing neighborhood work. In these hypothetical scenarios, boys and girls revealed similar perceptions of negotiation: they thought other children were similarly likely to negotiate, that it was similarly permissible to negotiate, that they would receive similarly little backlash for negotiating, and that negotiating would lead to similar rewards. Furthermore, girls and boys reported that they would negotiate to a similar extent in these hypothetical situations.
Through a subsequent experiment that included more than 200 child participants, the researchers sought to understand how boys and girls would negotiate based on their performance and their perceptions of this performance. Here, the children were asked to quickly identify images on a computer screen. The boys and girls performed roughly the same.
After these cognitive tasks, all children—regardless of their performance—were told that because of how they did, they should receive a bonus: pictures of animals. The children were then asked how many pictures they thought they should receive for their achievement.
Despite performing at approximately the same levels, there was a noticeable gender gap in how the participants responded to the question about the size of the bonus they thought they should receive:
Despite having similar perceptions of negotiation, consistent with the findings from the hypothetical studies, boys asked for bigger bonuses than girls did for completing the same work. This difference was not trivial: the typical boy asked for more bonus pictures than about 65% of girls did.
While girls and boys performed equally well in the cognitive task, their perceptions of their own competence differed: boys thought better of their performance than girls thought of theirs. This difference in perceived competence, the authors conclude, helped explain why boys asked for more than girls: boys believed they did better, and those boys were also more likely to negotiate for higher bonuses.
Also notable among the findings was that the relationship between children's perceptions of negotiation and their bonus requests differed by gender. Although girls' and boys' perceptions were similar on average, these perceptions only predicted boys' requests, not girls'. For instance, among boys, those who thought negotiating was more permissible were also more likely to ask for higher bonuses. In contrast, perceptions of the permissibility of negotiation were not associated with request magnitude among girls.
"Boys leveraged their perceptions of how common and permissible it is to ask for more, while girls did not," explains McAuliffe. "This meant that, for example, when both girls and boys thought it was more common and more permissible to negotiate, boys negotiated more than girls did."
The research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (DGE-2234660).
