Studies have shown a persistent gender gap when it comes to wages—disparities that stretch over decades. Past analyses have pointed to various causes for this discrepancy, but often overlooked is how such divides may surface early in life.

In a related new study of boys and girls, a team of psychology researchers has found that despite holding similar views on the purpose and value of negotiation, boys ask for bigger bonuses than girls do for completing the same work. The findings, reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, indicate that these outcomes are linked, in part, to differences in perceptions of abilities: in a series of cognitive tasks, boys had a higher opinion of their abilities and therefore asked for higher bonuses—even though they performed no better than girls did in these tasks.

Our findings suggest that boys tend to overestimate their abilities compared to girls—and relative to their actual performance,” says Sophie Arnold, a New York University doctoral student and the lead author of the paper. “This inflated self-perception may lead boys to feel more entitled to push the boundaries during negotiations

“These findings offer new perspectives on the possible origins of negotiation disparities that exist between adult men and women in professional settings,” concludes NYU Psychology Professor Andrei Cimpian, the paper’s senior author.

The research, which also included Katherine McAuliffe, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College, consisted of a series of three experiments. The first two of these were used to ascertain if boys and girls had similar perceptions of negotiation.

In a pair of hypothetical scenarios, boys and girls—aged six to nine—were introduced to situations in which they could negotiate a bonus with a teacher for completing classroom work or with a neighbor for completing neighborhood work. In these hypothetical scenarios, boys and girls revealed similar perceptions of negotiation: they thought other children were similarly likely to negotiate, that it was similarly permissible to negotiate, that they would receive similarly little backlash for negotiating, and that negotiating would lead to similar rewards. Furthermore, girls and boys reported that they would negotiate to a similar extent in these hypothetical situations.

Source: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2025/january/study-finds-gender-gap-with-children-when-it-comes-to-negotiatin.html