Women Don't Ask by Linda Babcock & Sara Laschever — book cover

Women Don't Ask

Linda Babcock & Sara Laschever · 2003

Blending salary data, lab experiments, and interviews, economist Linda Babcock and writer Sara Laschever show why women ask for what they want far less often than men, and how that quiet gap compounds into a lifetime of lost pay, opportunity, and power.

11 min read · 8 chapters · Communication

Why it’s on the shelf

It turned the throwaway line "she just didn't ask" into a measurable force behind the pay gap, and handed women the data, the psychology, and the tools to start asking.

Two of the ideas you’ll keep

The Clif summary of Women Don't Ask pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.

  1. In Babcock's study of graduating Carnegie Mellon master's students, **57% of the men negotiated their first salary but only 7% of the women did**, and those who negotiated raised their pay by about 7.4%, almost exactly the size of the starting gender pay gap.
  2. The cost of not asking **compounds**: declining to negotiate a first salary of, say, $30,000 up to $34,000 can, through years of percentage raises, leave someone **more than half a million dollars poorer over a career**, the single 'ask' you skip at 22 follows you to retirement.

The other 5 — and the full 11-minute summary — are in the app.

What’s inside: 8 chapters

The whole summary runs about 11 minutes, read or listened to.

  1. The Associate Dean's Answer
  2. Counting the Cost of Silence
  3. A World Without Negotiation
  4. Just So Much and No More: The Entitlement Gap
  5. Nice Girls Don't Ask
  6. The Real Risks of Asking
  7. Fear and the Dentist's Chair
  8. Turning It Around: The Female Advantage

Finish Women Don't Ask tonight.

Read or listen to the full summary in about 11 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.

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