What a decade of "lean in" got wrong, and what actually moves women up
Among women, fifty-four percent bargained over their latest job offer. Among men, the figure was forty-four percent. The women still earned less. Published in 2023 by Kray, Kennedy and Lee of Berkeley Haas and reported on by Fortune, this research should bring a decade of counsel to a close in one stroke.
The "lean in" era was built on a tidy premise. Women were thought to earn less and advance more slowly simply because they failed to request more. Teach women to ask through confidence trainings, negotiation courses and a steady nudge to honor their own worth, and the gap, we were told, would vanish. Employers found this theory easy to live with, since every fix it offered fell to the woman herself. The Berkeley findings turn that reasoning on its head. Women are asking more often than men, and they are asking and still landing lower.
Where the figure originates
Led by Laura Kray alongside Jessica Kennedy and Margaret Lee at the Haas School of Business at Berkeley, the study looked at how people haggled over their most recent job offers. What caught researchers off guard was that women bargained more often than men did. The key lesson is that women still took home less pay. A single study settles very little by itself. It fails to demonstrate that women negotiate either more skillfully or less, and it leaves many of the underlying drivers of the disparity unexplained. Its real contribution is to rule out the most straightforward explanation. A gap can't be blamed on a behavior that women are actually doing more of.
Other research in the field lines up with these results. Studies of the likability penalty have again and again found that an identical request reads as assertive when a man makes it and as pushy when a woman does. Combine the two findings and the story stops being "women don't ask." It becomes "women ask, and the room penalizes them for it."
How this plays out in real life
Picture yourself in Columbus, Ohio, at the moment an offer lands for a position you badly want. You've reviewed three postings with published ranges, you know the midpoint, and you request it, calmly and with solid reasons. The recruiter says she'll "see what she can do" and returns two thousand dollars higher, presented as a real stretch. A rival applicant for that same role in Dublin or Worthington asks for the upper end of the band and comes away near it, which is called "competitive." You bargained as well. He negotiated. The outcomes differ, and nothing you could have said on that call would have changed that, because the decision about what your request was worth was already made before you spoke.
How this bears on your own pay
When someone has suggested that you lack confidence, it's worth looking closely at what that counsel actually achieved. It placed the shortfall inside you, where remedying it costs the employer nothing. Tulshyan and Burey made a parallel argument about imposter syndrome in Harvard Business Review in 2021: the label puts a structural problem onto the individual. Calling it a confidence gap is simply the same argument restated in softer terms. You don't need repairing. The process needs examining.
Next steps
Raise the salary range with your Central Ohio employer, not your personal value. Try asking, "What does the published range look like for this level, and where does this offer sit inside it?" Because a growing number of states now mandate posted pay ranges, that question can be answered with facts. Then ask the one question that can't be attributed to your personality: "What would it take to reach the midpoint?" You are negotiating with the numbers, and numbers don't come across as demanding.
For Central Ohio women looking for those numbers, the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, the Columbus Partnership and local women's networks such as NAWBO Columbus and WELD's Columbus chapter are good places to compare notes on pay and advancement with peers.
Think back: when did you last make that ask, and what did it end up costing you?