Women Don’t Ask

n What will happen if we encourage women to negotiate? WHY WOMEN DON’T ASK At theACR2015 meeting, I spoke to the members of the American Association forWomen Radiologists (AAWR) about an issue I have heard as a recurrent theme from leaders in academic medicine, specifically in radiology (Table 1). This topic came to my attention when I read about research done by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever [1], which they summarized in a book calledWomen Don’t Ask. You might wonder why this is an issue. I believe it comes from the historical realitywomenhave experienced. They have been told, “Wedon’t accept women to our all-male colleges,” until by Harvard University in 1977 and Columbia College in 1983, which is relatively recent. Until Title IX legislation passed in 1972 [2], women rarely played on high school varsity sports teams; they were told that they were too weak and might damage their health. Even now, women are expected to wait to be asked to get married. When I finished my fellowship in pediatric radiology and was looking for a job inDenver, I was turned down by three different radiology groups. First, a private practice group refused my request to interview. The head of the search committee said, “We have 20 men in our radiology group, and we don’t want to hire any women. They get pregnant andquit.Therefore we don’t interview women.” At that time, radiology groups were already terminating women who became pregnant when working as technologists. They did not feel any pressure to