Lower-class employees face greater professional backlash for negotiating their salaries

People from lower social-class backgrounds are less likely to negotiate for workplace benefits, and they tend to face harsher social penalties when they decide to ask for more. This difference in behavior helps explain how economic inequality and a class ceiling persist in modern organizations. A recent study published in PNAS provides evidence that this negotiation gap acts as a double bind that can compound economic disadvantages over a person’s career. Remaining silent perpetuates financial struggles, but speaking up exposes lower-class workers to professional backlash.

Economic inequality has grown over the past few decades. Even with similar education and credentials, individuals from lower social classes tend to earn less and advance more slowly than those from higher social classes. This phenomenon is often called a class ceiling. To understand how modern institutions reproduce this social stratification, researchers looked at the daily interactions that determine career trajectories. They focused specifically on workplace negotiation.

Prior studies demonstrate a persistent gender gap in these types of workplace interactions. Women often negotiate less than men and experience harsher professional penalties when they do advocate for themselves. The authors of the current study wanted to explore whether a similar dynamic exists for socioeconomic background.

“There’s a large body of literature that documents a gender gap in negotiation,” said Ying Lin, an assistant professor of management at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. “However, we know very little about social class differences. Social class often remains invisible in organizations.”

“At the same time, we know that negotiation has a long-lasting impact on economic outcomes and career advancement, which is important for upward mobility,” Lin continued. “So we wonder whether there’s a social-class difference in people’s propensity to initiate negotiations, which may contribute to the ‘class ceiling’ phenomenon that prior research documents and the persistent inequalities.”

Negotiation is a primary way workers claim resources, increase their compensation, and secure promotions into leadership roles. Because negotiation plays an important role in shaping financial prosperity, differences in who decides to negotiate might act as a mechanism that sustains inequality. The authors proposed that a person’s social class systematically influences their likelihood of starting a negotiation. They suggested this gap stems from two distinct psychological factors: a person’s sense of power and their concerns about social backlash.

A sense of power refers to a person’s belief in their ability to control outcomes for themselves and others. Higher-class environments often provide more material resources and opportunities to exert control, fostering a stronger sense of power in social interactions. Concerns about social backlash involve the fear of negative consequences for breaking unwritten social rules. Because lower-class environments often rely on cooperation and harmony to navigate financial instability, asserting oneself in a negotiation might feel like a violation of those cooperative norms.

To test these ideas, the researchers conducted five separate studies. Study 1 analyzed a nationally representative survey of 7,883 employees in Australia, measuring social class through educational attainment. Controlling for demographic and employment characteristics like age, gender, and hours worked, the data indicated that higher-class individuals had 1.15 times higher odds of negotiating their starting pay. Lower-class individuals exhibited a lower propensity to negotiate, which was in turn associated with receiving lower hourly wages than their higher-class peers.

Study 2 looked at a more specific group: 634 Master of Business Administration (MBA) students at a prominent United States business school who had recently accepted full-time job offers. The researchers measured social class using the highest educational attainment of the students’ parents. Lower-class origins predicted a lower likelihood of negotiating starting salaries, even when controlling for grades, age, gender, and race. Not negotiating was associated with an average starting salary that was $6,450 lower than the salary of those who did negotiate.

Study 3 tested behavior in a controlled online environment with 699 adults in the United States. Participants completed a short drawing-guessing task and were informed they would receive a 50-cent bonus, but they were explicitly told the exact payment was negotiable up to $3. The researchers measured social class using a composite score of education, income, and subjective social status. Higher-class individuals had 1.65 times higher odds of explicitly requesting a higher bonus, a pattern that held even when controlling for actual task performance and participant confidence.

Study 4 surveyed 995 full-time workers in the United States, selected to match the country’s household income distribution. The authors asked participants about their subjective feelings toward negotiation and whether they had negotiated for starting salary, benefits, promotions, or job content. Higher social class predicted greater odds of negotiating across all these work domains, even when controlling for job industry and company size. Those who negotiated their starting salary secured an average gain of over $3,800 per year compared to those who accepted the initial offer.

The career impacts of asking for more were substantial. For instance, about 95 percent of the participants who asked for a promotion received one, compared to only 48 percent of those who did not ask. The authors found that a diminished sense of power and a heightened fear of social backlash partially explained why lower-class workers were less likely to initiate these conversations.

Study 5 tested whether the fear of social backlash is grounded in reality. The researchers recruited 1,133 human resources professionals to evaluate a fictional male job candidate’s resume and interview transcript. They randomly assigned the candidate to display lower-class or higher-class cues, such as listing a first-generation student club versus a sailing club. They also randomly assigned whether the candidate accepted the salary offer as is or negotiated for more money.

When the candidate negotiated, the human resources professionals rated him as less cooperative overall. This penalty was much larger for the lower-class candidate than the higher-class candidate. The perception of being uncooperative was associated with a lower likelihood that the human resources professionals would want to hire the candidate. This suggests that the same negotiation behavior elicits stronger social backlash when initiated by individuals from lower-class backgrounds.

Lin noted that framing a request in communal terms can sometimes help mitigate this penalty. Communal framing involves using language that emphasizes shared goals and teamwork, such as saying “we” instead of “I,” which softens the perception of demandingness.

“If you’re a person from the lower class, it helps to recognize that hesitation to ask is not a personal or personality failing; it’s completely normal and also a rational response to potential backlash,” Lin told PsyPost. “But it doesn’t mean don’t negotiate, as avoiding negotiation comes with a cost; it means recognizing that negotiation is normal, preparing for the difficulties, and it helps to frame negotiation in a more cooperative or communal term to help offset the social cost.”

Focusing exclusively on teaching lower-class individuals to negotiate more assertively will not resolve the class ceiling on its own. Because social class often goes unmeasured in corporate diversity efforts, organizations may need to take proactive steps to ensure fairness. Lin pointed out that the employees who actively ask for more compensation are not always the ones who are most deserving of it.

“It is important to design a structure where people can ask and receive equally, including 1) reducing how much career outcomes depend on asking, 2) making the rules or the opportunities of negotiation explicit and transparent, which tends to normalize asking, and 3) auditing both the process and outcomes,” Lin explained. She added that this means “starting to include social class in equity analyses (social class mostly remains invisible) and periodically checking if there’s any discrepancies in negotiation patterns, hiring recommendations, and comments like ‘not a team player’.”

The researchers detailed a few limitations to keep in mind. “We focus mostly on negotiation in work contexts. Social class differences may be attenuated or exacerbated in other contexts,” Lin noted.

Additionally, the final experiment presented a specific scenario that might not apply universally. “Our experiment on backlash against the lower-class candidate provides causal evidence about evaluators’ reactions, but it only examined one professional role, one compensation request, and U.S. based evaluators,” Lin said. “This pattern may vary by country, gender, the social class of the evaluators, as well as the context of negotiation.”

The study also focused exclusively on the decision to begin a negotiation. “We only studied the initiation of negotiation, not the strategies people use or other processes during negotiations,” Lin added.

This line of research connects to broader ideas about how local environments shape psychological development and everyday behavior. In behavioral science, the concept of cultural tightness describes communities that enforce strong social norms and exhibit low tolerance for rule-breaking.

“We recently published another paper documenting that the lower class lives in a ‘tighter’ world: they experience stronger norms around them and feel greater pressure to follow and enforce them,” Lin said. “Together, these two papers suggest that social class plays an important role in how people experience constraints and how much they feel empowered to challenge these constraints in their environment. This may be critical in understanding why class inequality tends to persist.”

The study, “The social-class gap in negotiation: Lower-class individuals negotiate less and face more backlash,” was authored by Ying Lin, Jackson G. Lu, and Michele J. Gelfand.