The perks are too few, she thinks, and the pay too low. Curious, she surveys colleagues about their meetings with the dean. Each of the women who had been in salary negotiations with the dean over the past five years accepted the dean's original pay offer. Specialists say that women tend to be so grateful for getting a foot in the door that they make few demands. Conditioned to be amenable and accepting, they face a number of unwritten but powerful social assumptions.
Women can succeed at negotiations by figuring out the hidden agendas and masked assumptions.
If a work issue is to be resolved in the woman's favor, the authors argue, she must bring those unvoiced assumptions to the surface, so that misguided perceptions and unrealistic expectations can be corrected. Even more subtle, but just as problematic, is the Catch-22 women face when they adopt a negotiating style perceived as more like a man's. If she acts like a woman, her skills may be devalued, too. Her intuition and social skills may be seen not as pluses, but as hindrances. Women often internalize behaviors that may hurt them at the bargaining table, Kolb and Williams say.