2016 Charleston Library Conference

In their groundbreaking work, Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide, Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever (2003) cite an extensive body of research to establish the circumstances that make negotiation fundamentally more difficult for women than it is for men. [1] According to the authors, a significant factor in this discrepancy is that "before we decide to negotiate for something we must first be dissatisfied with what we have;" unfortunately, women are "satisfied with less." [2] What does this mean for a profession that is 83% female? [3] In this Lively Lunch, participants will be asked to both share positive and negative negotiation experiences and crowdsource successful strategies to ease the challenges of gender and negotiation.

1. Babcock, Linda, and Sara Laschever. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide. Princeton University Press, 2009.
2. Ibid., p. 41.
3. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Household Data Annual Averages: Employed Persons by Detailed Occupation, Sex, Race, and Hispanic or Latino Ethnicity.” Current Population Survey, Table 11. Washington, D.C., 2015. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat11.pdf.