#comport yourself

now in the workplace, women often undervalue themselves - that's the view of the someone who was on the program yesterday. she was once one of the most powerful women on wall street. she believes that women don't ask for enough money when they negotiate with their bosses. that's if they even ask at all. we were digging deeper into this issue this morning. looking at ways for women to get the edge of negotiation. someone from our plant money has more. someone is the management professor at the university of texas and she became fascinated with the dynamics between men and women pretty early. she grew up with three brothers. she was the only girl in the gang of the neighborhood kids. when she went to graduate school, she found a lot of classic management advices was aimed more at her brother than herself. once you started to learn especially competitive negotiation tactics, you realized they were pretty at odds with how the women generally comport themselves and how they are expected to comport themselves. someone started to look closer at women's strength and weakness, and they certainly seem similar. To very much a high degree, i am the woman that i studied - i don't like to self promote, i feel uncomfortable in situations where i have to negotiate on my own behalf. someone wanted to find out the sources of that squeamishness. she began talking to other women about their experiences at work. again and again, she heard women say how difficult it was to advocate for themselves at the office. but something else kept coming up - they have no trouble speaking up for colleagues. so someone decided to set up a research experiment. first men and women had to negotiate the starting salary for themselves. the men did better than the women. and then each of the subjects was asked to negotiate for a friend. then what we saw was that on average, women who are negotiating salary for themselves threw out a counteroffer that was 7,000 less than the women who are negotiating for someone else. again, when women were told to negotiate for a friend, they are bargained as hard as a guy is. women are not bad negotiators. rather they are really quite savvy at negotiating. they just don't use those skills for themselves.