What a decade of "lean in" got wrong, and what actually moves women up
Negotiating over their most recent job offer was something that fifty-four percent of women did. Forty-four percent of men did. Even so, women walked away with the smaller package. Kray, Kennedy and Lee at Berkeley Haas produced that finding in 2023, and Fortune reported it, which should retire a decade of counsel that can be summed up in one line.
During the "lean in" era, a tidy story took hold. Some argue that women fall behind in pay and promotion mainly because they hold back from making requests. Repair the asking through confidence workshops, negotiation seminars and a firm reminder to own your worth, and the gap would shrink. That story suited employers well, since every fix it prescribed fell on the woman. The Berkeley data upends it. In practice, women are making requests at a higher rate than men. They ask, and they still land short.
Source of the statistic
Laura Kray, Jessica Kennedy and Margaret Lee, working through the Haas School of Business in Berkeley, studied how candidates bargained after receiving recent job offers. What caught attention was that women bargained more frequently. The core finding is that they still came out behind on pay. A single study is not enough to settle anything by itself. It does not show women negotiate better or worse, and it does not untangle every cause behind the different outcomes. Its real contribution is removing the most convenient explanation from the table. A wage difference cannot be traced to a practice that women already engage in more often than men do.
Research in other areas lines up with this. Work on the likability penalty has shown, again and again, that the same request reads as assertive when a man makes it and as demanding when a woman does. Once the two findings sit together, the conclusion changes. Women are not failing to speak up. They speak up, and the people across the table penalize them for doing it.
How this shows up in everyday working life
Picture yourself in Milwaukee, at the offer stage for a position you badly want. You have reviewed three postings that list pay ranges, you know where the midpoint sits, and you request it calmly, with reasons. The recruiter promises to "see what she can do" and comes back $2,000 higher, framed as a real stretch for the company. Another candidate interviewing for the same job asks for the top of the range and receives something close to it, described as "competitive." You negotiated. He negotiated. The results differ, and nothing you could have said on that call would have altered them, because the decision about what your request was worth had been made before you spoke.
Why this matters to you
When someone has told you that you simply need more confidence, think about what that advice actually did for you. It placed the shortfall inside you, where repairing it requires the employer to change nothing. In a 2021 Harvard Business Review piece, Tulshyan and Burey argued the same thing about imposter syndrome: the term loads a structural problem onto the person experiencing it. Calling it a confidence gap performs that identical maneuver in different language. You do not need repair. The process that sets pay needs scrutiny.
Your path forward in Milwaukee
Question the band, not your own value. Try asking, "What is the posted range for this level, and where does this offer sit inside it?" Several states, Wisconsin among those debating similar rules across the Southeast Wisconsin region, are moving toward requiring posted pay ranges, so the question can be answered with facts. Then ask the one question that cannot be read as a personality flaw: "What would it take to reach the midpoint?" You are negotiating with the numbers, and the numbers do not come across as demanding.
When did you most recently make a request, and what did it cost you?