Abstract
Despite a common call for reducing gender inequalities arising in negotiations, few solutions have emerged that effectively address that women often ask—and even intend to ask—for less compared to men in negotiations. In this paper, we focus on intentions prior to a negotiation. We explore how a simple reminder of women’s position in negotiations—showing either a stable or closing gender gap in salary requests—can potentially help combating this gender inequality. With these reminders, we aim to tap into psychological motivations inherent to sta- tus competition. Following two preregistered survey experiments (n=4,337) of business school students and gig-workers, we show that the reminder leads women to intend to request more compared to the control group in both samples. However, highlighting female progress by a closing gender gap leads male business students (but not male gig-workers) to request relatively more compared to when there is no highlighted female progress. Our work thus points both to the promise of simple interventions designed to reduce gender gaps in intended salary requests, as well as the perils arising from competitive dynamics as women actually approach parity