Women Don’t Ask

International Women’s Day event and Athena SWAN lecture

Sara Laschever discusses the groundbreaking classic that explores how women can and should negotiate for parity in their workplaces, homes, and beyond.

When Linda Babcock wanted to know why male graduate students were teaching their own courses while female students were always assigned as assistants, her dean said: “More men ask. The women just don’t ask.” Drawing on psychology, sociology, economics, and organisational behavior as well as dozens of interviews with men and women in different fields and at all stages in their careers, Women Don’t Ask explores how our institutions, child-rearing practices, and implicit assumptions discourage women from asking for the opportunities and resources that they have earned and deserve-perpetuating inequalities that are fundamentally unfair and economically unsound. Women Don’t Ask tells women how to ask, and why they should.