Abstract
Social norms tend to discourage women from negotiating
higher pay and cause gender pay gaps in the long run. Drawing on social norm
theory and role congruency theory, we expected that explicitly stating rules to
determine pay raises would help remove social barriers that may cause women to
steer away from the bargaining table. Using an experimental approach, we
examined how explicit pay raise rules affect men’s and women’s initiations of
salary negotiation differently. Our results show that when pay raise rules are
explicitly stated, women are less reluctant to ask for a pay raise. In
contrast, men’s decisions to ask are not impacted by this factor. This explicit
rule effect is particularly salient for women whose task performance is above
average. Our study confirms that social norms for men and women play a role in
asking for pay raises, and shows that explicitly stating pay raise rules helps
to remove barriers that prevent women from asking by creating an environment in
which internalized gender biases due to social norms are mitigated.
