Women Don’’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide

The groundbreaking classic that explores how women can and should negotiate for parity in their workplaces, homes, and beyond

When Linda Babcock wanted to know why male graduate students were teaching their own courses while female students were always assigned as assistants, her dean said: ＂More men ask. The women just don’t ask.＂ Drawing on psychology, sociology, economics, and organizational behavior as well as dozens of interviews with men and women in different fields and at all stages in their careers, Women Don’t Ask explores how our institutions, child-rearing practices, and implicit assumptions discourage women from asking for the opportunities and resources that they have earned and deserve-perpetuating inequalities that are fundamentally unfair and economically unsound. Women Don’t Ask tells women how to ask, and why they should.

Linda Babcock is the James M. Walton Professor of Economics and head of the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Sara Laschever is a writer whose work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Harvard Business Review, the Guardian, and Vogue. Babcock and Laschever are the coauthors of Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want.