NYU researchers found that gender-based wage gaps could potentially be affected by psychological behaviors that develop during childhood — when boys consistently request larger rewards than girls, despite performing identical tasks.
The study, led by Ph.D. candidate Sophie Arnold and psychology professor Andrei Cimpian, examined how children perceive negotiation, and how those perceptions affect their behavior. In three experiments with 462 children aged six to 12, children were presented with hypothetical scenarios in which they could negotiate bonuses with an adult after completing specified work. Ultimately, researchers found that boys asked for a larger bonus than 65% of girls.
“What I think our work adds is that some behaviors that contribute to the gender wage gap emerge in childhood,” Arnold said in a statement to WSN. “Greater understanding of these factors in development would complement the work on reducing the gender pay gap in adults.”
The study found that children’s perceptions of how competent they felt at a task dictated their willingness to negotiate. It subsequently established that girls generally had lower self-esteem than boys, despite the two groups exhibiting the same competence while performing tasks.
Arnold said that the difference was correlational and more expansive research would be required to determine whether self-esteem is the direct propagator of differences in negotiating habits. She suggested that increasing girls’ self-esteem — or making boys’ self-perception “more accurate” — may reduce the negotiating gap, but that there were several other factors to be examined.
“At this time, there’s still more exciting research that needs to be done before we can give quality recommendations for educators or policymakers,” Arnold said.
She added that contrary to researchers’ expectations, boys and girls perceived negotiations in relatively similar ways — they expected similar payoffs with consideration to the same factors, such as what their peers ask for. Now having established that girls think similarly but behave differently, she plans to further test how children implement different negotiation strategies in various scenarios — such as when the award being negotiated is not tangible, or when they negotiate with parents or teachers.
“This is a very new area of research,” Arnold said. “There are a lot of interesting questions yet to be asked and answered.”
Contact Vaishnavi Girish at [email protected].
