Children As Young As Eight Show A Gender Gap In Negotiation

By Emma Young Though the gender pay gap is narrowing in the UK, it still remains. It’s vital, then, to fully understand what causes it — and so what can be done to ensure that women are paid the same as men for doing the same work. Research does show that women are less likely than men to initiate salary negotiations, and also ask for less. Now a new study in Psychological Science reveals that a gender gap in negotiation emerges surprisingly early, becoming apparent among children aged just eight to nine. This implies that efforts to close the gender pay gap should start long before anyone even enters the workforce.  Sophie Arnold at Boston College and Katherine McAuliffe at New York University studied 240 boys and girls who lived in the Boston area. The children fell into three age groups: 4 to 5, 6 to 7, and 8 to 9. They each completed a simple task, after which an experimenter — either a man or a woman — told them that they could pick from sets of stickers as a reward. Each child was asked: ‘How many stickers do you think you should get for completing the game you just played?’ If the child asked for two or fewer, they were given this number. But if they asked for more than two, the experimenter told them that they were asking for too many and repeated the question. If the child again asked for more than two, they moved to the next negotiation stage. (Of the initial 240 children, 154 — equal numbers boys and girls — reached this stage...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Developmental Gender Source Type: blogs