Sara Laschever is a writer with a longstanding interest in the life and career obstacles faced by women in the workplace. Her work has been published by The New York Times, The Harvard Business Review, The New York Review of Books, Vogue, Glamour, WomensBiz, and many other publications.
Her first book, Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation—and Positive Strategies for Change, co-authored with Linda Babcock, explored a newly recognized phenomenon: that women are much less likely than men to use negotiation to improve their circumstances. Women Don’t Ask looks at the causes of this reluctance on the part of women and examines the high price women pay in both lost wages and delayed career advancement.
Ask For It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want, Ms. Laschever’s new book, also written with Linda Babcock, will be published in March 2008 by Bantam Publishing. Ask For It presents a four-phase program that guides women through the process of refining their goals, polishing their skills, and thoroughly preparing for those negotiations, both large and small, that can change their lives and increase their happiness.
Women Don’t Ask has been discussed or favorably reviewed by, among others, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Business Week, The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, The International Herald Tribune, and many other newspapers and magazines in the U.S. and around the world. Fortune magazine included the book in its list of “The 75 Smartest Books We Know,” a list that included The Art of War by Sun Tzu, The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, by John Maynard Keynes, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, and The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell.
Ms. Laschever has also lectured about women and negotiation for the Microsoft Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Procter & Gamble, the Aon Corporation, Deloitte Consulting, DuPont, the Employment Management Association, the Forbes Executive Women’s Forum, the Program on Negotiation at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Women in Communications, Inc., and many nonprofit professional associations and women’s leadership groups.
She and Linda Babcock were invited by Representatives John Dingel and Carolyn Maloney to give a congressional briefing on the impact on the glass ceiling of the phenomenon they describe in Women Don’t Ask.
Sara Laschever lives in Concord, Massachusetts with her family.