What had W done wrong? Perhaps nothing, at least according to the advice to “lean in” that women have become accustomed to hearing. “This is how I thought negotiating worked,” W wrote. “I just thought there was no harm in asking.” (It’s entirely possible that there were factors at play not covered in the leaked correspondence—a Nazareth representative told me that the college was unable to comment on a personnel issue.)

In a  survey of graduating professional students, Linda Babcock, of Carnegie Mellon University, found that only seven per cent of women attempted to negotiate their initial offers, while fifty-seven per cent of the men did so. We see those dire statistics and think that women are, in a sense, self-sabotaging. They don’t ask for the same compensation and benefits as men, so they can’t rightly be expected to receive them. But is it really the case that the disadvantage stems from not asking? Sheryl Sandberg, the chief operating officer of Facebook, acknowledges the difficulties of negotiation, but nonetheless urges  women to push forward (“I negotiated hard,” she writes) and to do what they would do if they weren’t afraid. But, had W spoken to psychologists who study the role of gender in negotiation alongside more popularly rendered edicts from women at the top of their fields, she might have been less surprised at the outcome.

Hannah Riley Bowles, a senior lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and the director of the Women and Power program, has been studying gender effects on negotiation through laboratory studies, case studies, and extensive interviews with executives and employees in diverse fields. She’s repeatedly found evidence that our implicit gender perceptions mean that the advice that women stand up for themselves and assert their position strongly in negotiations may not have the intended effect. It may even backfire.

Bowles and collaborators from Carnegie Mellon found that people penalized women who initiated negotiations for higher compensation more than they did men. The effect held whether they saw the negotiation on video or read about it on paper, whether they viewed it from a disinterested third-party perspective or imagined themselves as senior managers in a corporation evaluating an internal candidate. Even women penalized the women who initiated the conversation, though they also penalized the men who did so. They just didn’t seem to like seeing someone ask for more money.  In a follow-up study, Bowles asked participants whether they themselves would negotiate in the given scenario—that is, they were now the job candidate and not the evaluating manager. The women, for the most part, said no. They were nervous that the conversation would turn against them. “Women are more reticent to negotiate than men, for good reason,” Bowles says.