Most Americans—male or female—don’t ask for higher compensation when negotiating a job offer, even if they know they should. A new survey offers a reminder why: According to the Pew Research Center, some two-thirds of respondents who made attempts to negotiate starting salaries said they got more than was originally offered, though the outcomes were somewhat less favorable for women.
The finding, part of a broader survey Pew recently released on how Americans view their jobs and how many continue to work remotely, found that among all workers who did ask for higher pay, 28% said they were given the new amount they requested. Another 38% said they were offered more than what was first suggested but less than they requested, with the remainder only getting the initial offer.
That means about 66% of job candidates got better starting salary offers after asking for more. “That does seem higher than you might expect,” says Kim Parker, director of social trends research at Pew Research Center. “We had never seen the question asked before.”
Yet first, of course, people have to ask. Pew’s survey, which queried 5,188 U.S. workers who are employed either full- or part-time and aren’t self-employed, found that just 30% said they recalled asking for higher pay the last time they were hired for a job. While men were slightly more likely to say they did than women (32% versus 28%), and the gap is statistically significant, “it’s not huge,” said Parker. “Based on what you hear and read about this issue, we thought we might see a bigger difference.”
That finding, combined with others that show a bigger gender difference on other aspects of salary negotiation, prompted Parker to suggest releasing the findings separately from a report Pew shared last week. The earlier report found that about 51% of U.S. workers are highly satisfied with their job and that about a third of workers in jobs that can be remote are still working from home full-time.
The additional data released does show a much wider divergence on how comfortable men and women feel about asking for higher starting salaries and how successful they were in their efforts. Only 33% of men said they didn’t feel comfortable asking for higher pay, compared with 42% of women.
Meanwhile, there was also a big difference in the results women saw from their requests versus men. When broken out by gender, 38% of women who asked for a higher starting salary said they did not get more pay, while only 31% of men who negotiated were stuck with their initial offer.
Pew’s results appear to underscore that the issue is less that women disproportionately don’t ask for higher salaries—but that they face obstacles when they do make those requests or worry about how they will be perceived when they negotiate.
Still, the relatively narrower difference between men and women who asked for higher starting salaries could be a sign the drumbeat about pay equity is having an impact, Parker says. “I wonder if the lack of a big gender gap [on the question about negotiating or not] means we’re starting to see the effects” of focus on the issue, she says, noting Pew doesn’t have historical data for these questions. “It’s nice to have some numbers to put to this.”
Meanwhile, it’s unclear what impact pay transparency laws that require employers to post pay ranges in job ads, which have gone into effect in places such as Colorado, California and New York City, are having. But it’s possible that getting out more information on the pay ranges companies are willing to pay could get that share of employees that’s willing to negotiate—both male and female—a little higher over time.