I gave a talk yesterday about The Hidden Brain at the John F Kennedy School
of Government at Harvard University. My comments centered on The Invisible
Current chapter in my book, which deals with the issue of sexism — how to
identify it, how to measure it, and what we can do about it.

As often happens at these sessions, someone asked what we can do about such
bias. I gave one very specific example drawn from the research into sexism
that shows that men and women tend to negotiate differently based on
whether they are negotiating with a man or a woman. Without anyone’s
conscious awareness, male evaluators tend to be biased against women who
negotiate — for a higher salary, for example. Male evaluators don’t
necessarily like men who bargain for more, but they consider it more
acceptable (in their unconscious minds) for men to negotiate than for women
to do so. By contrast, female evaluators tend not to like negotiators in
general, but they are not biased against women — they feel unfavorably
toward both men and women who ask for more. This research might help
explain observational data that show women are less likely than men to
negotiate in a variety of experimental and real-life settings (especially
when they are negotiating with men). Without their conscious awareness, in
other words, women may be picking up signals that negotiating could hurt
them.