Do Black candidates get penalized for negotiating salary, and how do you negotiate anyway?

What the study found

In “Bargaining While Black” (Hernandez, Avery, Volpone and Kaiser, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2019), researchers ran three studies on race and salary negotiation.

• Evaluators with higher racial bias expected Black job seekers to negotiate less than white job seekers with identical resumes.
• In live negotiations, Black and white candidates negotiated about the same amount. Biased evaluators perceived the Black candidates as negotiating more, and those candidates ended with lower starting salaries, and the more counters the evaluator perceived, the lower the offer.
• The mechanism was resistance: evaluators became less willing to make concessions to Black candidates.

The penalty is not for negotiating. It is for how much negotiating a biased evaluator thinks they saw. That points to the fix.

Why does not negotiating cost more?

Even a few hundred dollars lost per perceived counter is real money (my rough illustration, not a figure from the study). Skipping the negotiation costs far more. A $10,000 gap at the start compounds through every raise, and over 20 years, assuming 3% annual raises, it runs to about $269,000. Here is the math. The question is not whether to negotiate. It is how to negotiate so there is less for bias to work with.

How do you negotiate anyway?

1. Get the range first. In California, any employer must give an applicant the pay scale on request, and employers with 15 or more employees must post it (Labor Code 432.3). A number the employer put in writing is harder to call aggressive when you ask to land inside it. Here is how to ask. California law helps, see employment laws for negotiating.

2. Make one well-built counter, not five small ones. The study measured the cost of each perceived additional counter. Put salary, sign-on, start date and title into one written counter with a reason for each, so the negotiation takes one round instead of several.

3. Lead with the source, not the want. “Posted ranges for this role and level in the Bay Area run $X to $Y, and my record puts me in the upper half” frames the ask as market data. Evaluators resist concessions less when the number is plainly someone else’s.

4. Put it in writing. Email carries the ask without tone. It also creates a record, which matters if pay is ever questioned later. Recap every phone conversation in a short email the same day.

5. Know your walk-away number before the call. A clear floor keeps you from trading down under pressure, and it keeps the conversation short.

A counter that takes one round

“Thank you for the offer. I’m excited about the role and want to make this work. Based on posted ranges for this role and level in the Bay Area, and the results I’ve delivered in similar work, I’m asking for a base of $X, a $Y sign-on bonus, and a start date of Z. If we can get there, I’m ready to sign this week.” Every term is on the table at once, the source comes first, and the close tells them what agreement looks like.

What should you leave unchanged?

Do not shrink the ask to seem agreeable. The research shows the penalty comes from the evaluator’s perception, not from the size of a reasonable, sourced request. Lowering your number only guarantees the loss. The same goes for tone: code-switching has its own cost, and you should not have to perform a different person to be paid correctly.

If you want a salary negotiation coach who plans for this risk instead of ignoring it, that is the work I do as a Black career coach based in Oakland, working across the Bay Area with Black professionals and other first-generation and underrepresented candidates. The three career tiers are fixed-price and published.

For employers reading this

If your offers vary by who pushes hardest, your pay structure is carrying bias you did not intend. Posted ranges, a written approval path for offers outside the range, and a periodic pay equity review close the gap for everyone. California’s Equal Pay Act covers race and ethnicity, not only sex.

The long-run arithmetic is in does taking the first offer still cost you 20 years later, and the exact phrases are in counter-offer phrases for first-generation professionals.

For a method of documenting your results before you ask, see how to show your judgment in a pay conversation.

For a related angle, see why confidence is built by reps, not pep talks.

McKinley holds a J.D. but is not a licensed attorney. Articles here are general information, not legal advice. For your specific situation, talk with an employment attorney.

Data current as of September 2026. Sources are linked where each figure appears.