The Numbers That Tell The Real Story

Let’s start with the stats because they’re too important to skip.

Only 36% of women feel comfortable asking for a raise at work. Compare that to 44% of men. That gap alone is significant.

But here’s where it gets even more revealing.

When researchers compared like-for-like men and women making the exact same ask, men were a quarter more likely to actually receive the raise. Men obtained a pay increase 20% of the time. Women only 16%.

More recent research has found something even more striking, women are now actually MORE likely than men to ask for higher compensation, and they still earn less.

Read that again.

Women are asking MORE than men, and still getting paid less.

So the next time someone tells you women just need more confidence, or just need to ask for what they’re worth, point them to that data, because the problem was never the asking. The problem is what happens after the ask.

That’s not a confidence problem, that’s a permission problem baked into the system itself.

The Access Economy

We live in what I’d call an access economy, a system where certain people are granted access, credibility and opportunity by default, while others have to continuously prove they deserve it.

Men are born into credit in this economy. We walk into rooms and our competence is assumed. Our leadership is assumed, our right to ask for more is assumed, nobody questions whether we belong there.

Women walk into the same rooms and have to earn every single one of those things from scratch. Every time, in every room, for their entire careers.

That’s the access gap in practice, and it shows up in ways both enormous and invisible:

The woman whose salary negotiation gets rejected while her male counterpart’s identical ask gets approved.

The woman whose idea is dismissed in a meeting and then celebrated when a man restates it.

The woman who is passed over for promotion because she “doesn’t seem ready” while a less qualified man is chosen because he “has potential.”

The woman who is called aggressive for the same behavior that makes a man a strong leader.

These aren’t isolated incidents, they’re a pattern, and now we have the data to prove it.

What Men Can Actually Do

Here’s what I’m asking men to do, specifically, concretely, starting now:

Notice who gets heard. In your next meeting pay attention to whose ideas land and whose get talked over. When a woman’s idea gets dismissed and then restated by a man, say something. “Actually Sarah said that ten minutes ago.” That one sentence changes the dynamic.

Examine your own assumptions. When a woman asks for a raise, what’s your first internal reaction? Does it feel different than when a man makes the same ask? Be honest with yourself. That gut reaction is where the permission gap lives in you specifically.

Extend access explicitly. Tell the women in your professional life directly that their ideas matter, that their leadership is valued, that their ask is reasonable. Don’t wait for them to fight for it, give it freely. That’s what you were given and never had to ask for.

Use your credit. Men have unearned credibility in most rooms. Use it to amplify women’s voices not to speak over them, when you have the floor use it to create space for someone who doesn’t get it as freely.

The Access You Were Given

I want to close with something personal.

I didn’t understand my own permission until women started extending theirs to me.

When women began booking photo shoots with me, when they started saying yes to the podcast, when they started sharing things in those conversations that they’d never told anyone else, that’s when I understood what access actually feels like when it’s given freely.

Men get that freely in most rooms. Women don’t.

That’s not a confidence problem. That’s a system problem, and the system doesn’t change itself.

We have to change it.

This is Pattern #2 from my upcoming book, The Strongest Thing a Man Can Do. More on that very soon. 🙏