When Linda Babcock wanted to know why male graduate students were teaching their own courses while female students were always assigned as assistants, her dean said: “More men ask. The women just don’t ask.” Drawing on psychology, sociology, economics, and organizational behavior as well as dozens of interviews with men and women in different fields and at all stages in their careers, Women Don’t Ask explores how our institutions, child-rearing practices, and implicit assumptions discourage women from asking for the opportunities and resources that they have earned and deserve—perpetuating inequalities that are fundamentally unfair and economically unsound. Women Don’t Ask tells women how to ask, and why they should.
Linda Babcock is the James M. Walton Professor of Economics and head of the Department of Social and Decision Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University. Sara Laschever is a writer whose work has appeared in such publications as the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, Harvard Business Review, the Guardian, and Vogue. Babcock and Laschever are the coauthors of Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want.
"An eye-opener, a call to arms, and a plan for action; it is enlightening, unsettling, and, ultimately, inspiring."—Teresa Heinz
"The first book to adequately explain the dramatic differences in how men and women negotiate and why women so often fail to ask for what they want at work (starting with equal pay)."—Fortune
"Enlightening."—Denise Kersten, USA Today
"Provocative. . . . Offers important insights into the persistent economic gap between men and women."—Dolores Kong, Boston Globe
"Should be read by anyone with a fear of negotiating, male or female, and by managers who want a better understanding of how 47 percent of the work force confronts the workplace."—Alan B. Krueger, New York Times
