How to Ask for a Raise in 2026 with Kathryn Valentine

Tori Dunlap (0:00)

Right now, a lot of women are watching the headlines, AI layoffs, hiring freezes, low hire, low fire, and quietly deciding, this is not the year to ask for a raise. Just keep your head down, be grateful you have a job and wait for things to settle. But my guest today is here to tell you that that instinct is actually backwards. So what we're getting into today is how to respond when they tell you there's no budget for raises and how to make an ask in a way that puts you on your manager's side, not on their firing pile. Kathryn Valentine is back on the show. She's an executive coach and one of the country's leading experts on women's negotiation whose TEDx talk became the number one most trending talk on ted.com. She coaches women inside communities like JP. Morgan, Bain and KPMG and her whole body of work is built on one uncomfortable finding that women negotiate as often as men now, but succeed about half as often. If you've been telling yourself, I was just going to wait a year before I ask, or don't even know how to go about preparing for a negotiation, I want you to hear this episode. Let's get into it.

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So Kathryn, welcome back to the show. I need you to walk us through what you're actually seeing right now. Are women negotiating more or less in this market? And what is that actually doing for them long term?

Kathryn Valentine (3:06)

So I have good news and bad news. The good news is women are actually negotiating as often as men are. So yay, we're doing it. The bad news is we're only successful half as often because we continue to do it with the wrong tools, which I know is something we're going to solve today.

Tori Dunlap (3:21)

So for the woman who's never really thought about negotiation as a skill she needs, you mentioned maybe having the wrong tools to do this. Why does learning this matter so much, especially right now?

Kathryn Valentine (3:31)

I'd say there's three reasons. One is because it will advance your career and it will give you more control over the way things happen.

And so are you getting credit for that work or is somebody else? Do you have an additional resource to do it with? When is the deadline? These are all things that help you continue to move upwards. And we know that promotions are really where you get a lot of that financial gain. One.

Two, it reduces stress. So I bought a car on Monday and they didn't have the hitch on it that I needed. Instead of me driving another four hours, he drove to me and put it on my car in my driveway. And so those are the kinds of things like, I just got half of my date back because I was able to negotiate that. So you can negotiate to lower your stress at a time when we see unprecedented levels of burnout in women. And then the last one, which I know you talk about a lot, is just the financial ramifications of this. So the kind of stat that people toss out a lot is Linda Babcock's choosing not to negotiate is like leaving a million dollars on the table over your career. Margaret Neal at Stanford did a different version of it that shows that it's equivalent to working an additional eight years to do the same wealth. But then what I was thinking about actually listening to one of your episodes is that a lot of it depends on how old you are and how much you make, right? And so we created this new custom negotiation calculator and I'm happy to do it live with you if you want right now, where you put in your age, what you make and what you think you can negotiate. And it'll show you the lifetime value of that one conversation because much like compound interest, our brains don't necessarily understand that that $5,000 raise is a raise that you get for the next 40 years.