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One reason why it’s difficult for me to play hard ball in negotiations is because I want to be liked. Unfortunately, being liked as a woman means living up to gender norms about how we act, what we say, how we say it, and more. It’s these norms that we reinforce in order to stay on other people’s (both men’s and women’s) good side. Gender norms tell us that assertive women are bossy, that decisive women are heartless, that women who ask for more are ungrateful. We know that those same traits in men are seen for only what they are and they are seen as positive and masculinity affirming.
I’ve been thinking lately about how to encourage more women to take risks in negotiations and in the way they command themselves at work. What I’m realizing is that in addition to the difficulty involved in changing a lifelong behavior and mindset, to act differently in these public spaces means to act in ways that others perceive to be masculine, and that threatens our ability to be liked.
Even if we know intellectually that asking for more does not threaten our gender identity—we know that it very well may threaten how others see our expression of gender and be scared by its difference. Even if we want to welcome a change in the status quo, this means being the face of change and lots of people don’t like change. And as the cause of such discomfort in people, they may project that discomfort back at you in the form of not liking you. But this is not the full story.
As we try to both rock the boat and remain liked, we have to realize that projections of dislike from others are not really a reflection of us—they are a reflection of those people’s discomfort with the change we are demanding. They probably don’t even know that. But if we don’t constantly remind ourselves that it's okay if people don’t like us—rather that people displace their discomfort with change onto us—we risk staying in our gender norms for the sake of being liked. We have the power stop the world from progressing if we stay complacent with our need to be liked. We also have the power to be the first woman to negotiate in our company so that every woman that comes after us has a shorter hill to climb until there is just as much of an expectation that women will ask for more, as there is for men.