My mentor Ted asked me a question this week that I couldn’t answer.
Ted has been in my corner for years. Long career, senior rooms, the kind of person who has seen most things twice and isn’t easily surprised. We were talking about a pattern I’ve been noticing for months, and I was describing it carefully, the way you do when you’re not sure whether you’re onto something real or just tired.
Stakeholders pushing past agreed scope. Asking me to throw in an extra session. Questioning my costings line by line. Asking, in the gentlest possible language, whether I could just do this bit for free.
He listened all the way through. Then he said, “Is this a female thing? Because I’ve never encountered it.” Never. Not once in a long career.
I sat with that. And I couldn’t think of a single time in eighteen years that a man had asked me to discount my rates or work outside the agreement for nothing.
What the pattern actually looks like
I want to be specific, because “pushing back on price” sounds like ordinary commercial life, and this isn’t quite that. It’s a program signed off, and then a request to add a half-day, because I’ll already be in the building.
It’s someone walking through my quote line by line, with the word “just” doing an enormous amount of work. Could you just extend the pre-work? Could you just include the follow-up? Could you just sit in on the exec session afterwards?
It’s being asked to run a taster — unpaid — for a decision that was already made. It’s the second cohort that was never in the agreement but is now assumed, discovered three weeks out when someone forwards me a calendar invitation.
It’s the question, asked warmly, about what the number would look like without the margin.
Individually, every one of these is reasonable. That’s the thing about it. Nobody in these conversations is behaving badly. Which is exactly why it took me months to see it as a pattern rather than a run of unrelated Tuesdays.
The part I’d rather not write
I spent a day this week absolutely filthy about it. Not upset. Angry (actually I also cried too)—the kind of angry where you draft three emails you don’t send and reorganise a cupboard you didn’t need to reorganise.
Here’s the part I’d rather not write. It isn’t that I was angry. It’s that I spent the second half of that day working out whether I was allowed to be.
Whether I was overreacting. Whether it was one difficult week. Whether I’d been unclear in the scoping call or this was my own fault. Whether being annoyed about it made me precious or, worse, difficult.
I have run leadership programs on exactly this reflex. I can name it in a room full of other people in about four seconds. I spent six hours failing to name it in myself.
And it wasn’t about one client, and it wasn’t about money. It was about the accumulation. Eighteen years of building something, three books, thousands of leaders through our programs — and still, sitting on a call while someone works out whether what I do is worth what I’ve said it’s worth.
That’s what it feels like from the inside. Not a commercial conversation. My worth on the table.
I know I teach boundaries for a living. That’s precisely why I’m telling you.
Why the obvious answer is the wrong one
The easy version of this piece writes itself: women are hardest on other women. You’ve read that article. It gets shared a lot. It gets shared because it’s tidy and because it locates the whole problem inside women, where it’s cheap to fix.
I don’t think it’s true, and I’m not writing it.
First, my sample is skewed, and I should say so plainly. I sell leadership development. My buyers sit in HR, People and Culture, and L&D — overwhelmingly female professions. If nearly all my stakeholders are women, then “men never negotiate me down” partly just means “I don’t have many male buyers.” Any honest version of this piece has to start there.
But the second reason is more interesting, because the research points somewhere else entirely.
What the evidence actually says
Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock and Lei Lai ran experiments where the request was held completely constant. Same words, same amount, same context. The only thing that varied was whether a man or a woman was asking.
Identical requests didn’t carry identical consequences. When the request came from a woman, evaluators judged her manner more harshly and were less willing to work with her again. She was read as demanding.
Sit with that for a second, because it inverts most of the advice women get. It isn’t a confidence gap. It’s a reception gap. The woman asks the same thing and is charged more for asking. Every “just be more assertive” workshop is training people to do something that has a different price depending on who does it.
Then there’s the work on non-promotable tasks — necessary work that nobody gets rewarded for. Across field and lab studies, Babcock and her colleagues found that women volunteer for it more, are asked to do it more, and say yes more often. And the driver isn’t a preference. It’s the expectation itself: people believe women will say yes, so they ask women, and women — knowing they’re the ones being asked — say yes.
And here’s the finding that answers Ted’s question. Female managers ask women more often too. One of the researchers realised she had built an entirely female volunteer list without noticing she’d done it.
So no, Ted. It isn’t women being difficult with other women.
It’s that all of us have absorbed the same expectation: a woman will accommodate. She’ll be generous. She’ll find a way to say yes. Nobody has to be unkind for this to operate. It runs on autopilot, in people who would be mortified to hear it described out loud.
Which is also why it lands the way it does. When someone asks a man to lower his price, he hears a commercial position. When someone asks me, I hear a verdict — because underneath the request is an assumption that I’ll fold, and folding is what makes me a good woman.
That’s the trap. Hold the line and you’re difficult. Don’t, and you’ve confirmed the assumption that made the request cheap to make in the first place.
What I’m changing
Scope in writing, before anything starts. What’s included, what isn’t, what triggers a new line item. Ambiguity always gets resolved in favour of the person who isn’t paying.
“Can you just…” gets a price, not a yes. Not a no. A price. It turns out most of these requests evaporate the moment they have a number attached, which tells you something about how seriously they were meant.
No more discounting to be liked. If I reduce a fee, it’s for a strategic reason I can name out loud, and something comes out of scope to match. A discount with nothing removed isn’t a negotiation. It’s a donation.
Naming it in the room. “That’s outside what we agreed — happy to quote it.” Ten words. I’ve spent eighteen years not saying them.
Sitting in the silence afterwards. This is the hard one. The pause after you decline something is where I have always caved. I’m learning to let it sit there and be someone else’s problem to fill.
Watching who I ask. Because I’ve done this too, and the research is about me as much as it’s about anyone.
The bit I want you to take with you
If you’re a woman who sells something — your expertise, your time, your rate, your ideas — and you’ve wondered why the conversation about your worth is harder than it seems to be for the men around you: it isn’t in your head, and it isn’t a failure of nerve. It’s a reception gap; it’s documented, and you are not imagining it.
And if you’re the one doing the asking, check whom you’re asking. We all reach for the woman first. I’ve done it. That’s not a character flaw. But once you’ve seen it, you’re responsible for it.
Your rate isn’t an opening position.
Sonia x
The Globe’s Best Leadership and Courage Coach and Keynote Speaker
