Why Women Don’t Negotiate
by Marc H. RudovHooked on Entitlements
Each week for the past two months, I have appeared with Lis Wiehl in a featured slugfest over women’s rights on Fox News Channel’s Your World with Neil Cavuto. As we’ve debated the topics of flex-time for working mothers, the purported gender wage gap, the economic value of stay-at-home moms, and the pandering to women of presidential candidate John Edwards, the essence of our battle has been the same: whether or not women, who supposedly want equality with men, deserve special privileges.
American women control almost 60% of national wealth and make 80% of the purchases. They comprise 54% of the electorate and graduate college 33% more frequently than men. Through the Roe v. Wade decision, they have the unilateral right to opt out of parenthood. Moreover, the American woman can, with impunity, engage in maternity fraud (lying about her fertility or use of birth control) and paternity fraud (lying about her child’s real father).
Wait, there’s more. American women bring 70% of divorce actions, have children out of wedlock at least 37% of the time, and are invariably “entitled” to child custody, child support, and alimony. When women falsely accuse men of rape and domestic violence, thereby committing felonies, they are never prosecuted. The list of female rights and privileges goes on and on and on. Yet, to Lis Wiehl and most feminists, women are, somehow, at a disadvantage to men.
There are three calamities every man dreads in his life: prostate problems, divorce, and seeing a female cry. Few little girls are old enough to see their fathers suffer from the first calamity, but they’re never too young to witness them getting hosed in female-biased divorce courts — at the hands of their manipulative mothers.
More basically, as toddlers, then continuing as adolescents and even adults, girls perfect the art of manipulating their fathers with tears, whining, foot-stomping, and screaming tantrums. Because these fathers are such pushovers and seemingly give their daughters everything, they actually fail to give them the most-important gift of all: the word NO! Compounding this problem is that, because so many mothers are either divorced or never married, so few fathers spend enough time with their daughters to impart any influence whatsoever.
Adding to her bag of tricks, the savvy postpubescent girl recognizes how to manipulate the other men in her life, too. She gets free meals, cars, tuition, vacations, homes, and jewelry — which she views as entitlements — by raising her hemline, lowering her neckline, shrinking her waistline, and leveling her spine.
So, when a woman enters the workforce, if her “negotiating experience” is largely comprised of emotional and sexual bartering and manipulation — without having had to employ any intellectual skill or ever expecting to hear NO! — she is ill-prepared to wrangle with employers over compensation.
What happens frequently is that a woman hears NO for the first time in her professional life, and she doesn’t know how to handle it. Her first thought: unfairness. Men, on the other hand, are accustomed to being rejected in their personal and professional lives. They expect it. So, for men, negotiation — the art of mutually arriving at a win/win point — is required for survival. Are all men good at negotiating? Of course not. Do all men in similar positions receive the same compensation? If you think so, you are naive.
Because women, as a rule, don’t negotiate, they have a deserved reputation for accepting whatever their employers offer them. In their 2002 book, A Woman’s Guide to Successful Negotiating, the father and daughter team of Lee E. Miller and Jessica Miller claim that women fear negotiating because they are obsessed with pleasing others. I think their point is somewhat valid, but, in general, I totally disagree with it. In childhood, adolescence, dating, marriage, and divorce, women are the ones being pleased — not the ones doing the pleasing. So, exactly when do they learn to negotiate — or, for that matter, that negotiation is ever required? Good question.
To master anything in life, whether playing golf or negotiating, one must incorporate a combination of skill, drive, practice, desire to improve, and results — both success and failure. Learning to take failure in stride as a learning experience is extremely important to achieving success. Unfortunately, because most women are raised to be takers, isolated from the pains of failure, they never learn this critical lesson.
Every sales or negotiating course includes some variation of this principle: success is like a ladder; every time you hear “no” — which you will hear most of the time — you ascend one more rung until, ultimately, you reach yes. Put another way: nobody, ever, will just hand you something worthwhile. Ask any college-age girl if she’s ever heard this axiom, and she will laugh in your face.
This is why John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, and Barak Obama promise women more “equality” legislation and programs, and find receptive audiences: women are trained from birth to expect — and get — special privileges, just for being women. This pandering does not help women at all; it keeps them in expectation mode, instead of inspiring them to work harder and smarter — and learn negotiating skills. Demagoguery may get politicians elected (and reelected), but they will have to serve a whole population of women hooked on entitlements. How do women benefit from this?
When a woman is negotiating professional compensation, it is akin to acquiring a car or a house: she must enter the transaction with deep knowledge of the product (she is the product), the buyer, the seller (she is also the seller), and marketplace conditions — as well as her bottom line and the point at which she is willing to walk away from the deal. If she is deficient in such knowledge, she has no business being at the negotiating table.
Let’s say a woman is applying for a position, which, according to her research, pays a range of $80K to $100K (the hiring manager, like the car salesman, always knows when his counterpart is an informed, skilled negotiator — and when she’s not). This boss offers her $80K. She accepts the offer. I repeat: she accepts the offer. I repeat again: she accepts the offer. If she then discovers that a man (or another woman) has a similar position at $100K and concludes that the boss discriminated against her, she’s correct: bosses, car salesmen, and realtors discriminate against bad negotiators. Instead of going to her lawyer or her Congressman, she should go to Amazon.com to order a book on negotiating.
The NoNonsense Bottom Line
I never stated nor implied that women can’t negotiate. I opined that women, in general, don’t negotiate. They have been trained to believe they don’t have to, and both wining/dining men and demagogic politicians validate those beliefs. Yet, Oprah Winfrey and Katie Couric and Meg Whitman (CEO of eBay) and Anne Mulcahy (CEO of Xerox) and Patricia Russo (CEO of Alcatel-Lucent) have proven that women can negotiate very well.
Women will find themselves being treated like equals when they act like equals — when they negotiate instead of nag, when they win instead of whine. The examples of equal women, like those mentioned in the previous paragraph, abound. Women are responsible for their own successes and cannot blame men, employers, or politicians for their failures.
A woman seated at the negotiating table — for a car, a house, or a job — who, in the back of her mind, equates victimhood with sisterhood, will lose. Eventually, she will realize that capitalism trumps feminism. Negotiation is at the core of capitalism; feminism isn’t. Are you a capitalist or a feminist? You’ll find out at your next negotiation.
About the Author
Marc H. Rudov is an internationally recognized author of 55+ articles and the books Under the Clitoral Hood: How to Crank Her Engine Without Cash, Booze, or Jumper Cables (ISBN 9780974501727), and The Man’s No-Nonsense Guide to Women: How to Succeed in Romance on Planet Earth (ISBN 0974501719).
Rudov’s books, articles, blog, and podcasts are available at TheNoNonsenseMan.com.
Copyright © 2007 by Marc H. Rudov. All rights reserved.