Closing The Gap

Changing the conversations that shape your career.

Pay, promotion, authority, opportunity — the negotiations that shape what you're rewarded for, what you're trusted with and what happens next.

Most negotiation training ends the week you finish it, which is almost never the week your negotiation happens.

Two months of method. Ten months of doing it for real.

Because leverage takes months to build, and the timing is something you can influence but rarely control.

You're not bad at negotiation — you're playing a harder game.

Research consistently finds it is riskier for women to act assertively in negotiation. Behaviour that's perfectly acceptable coming from a man triggers backlash when it comes from a woman.

Which means the hesitation you may have been treating as a personal weakness is closer to an accurate reading of the room. Holding back is a rational response to a genuine risk. It's simply a very expensive one — and it isn't the only response available.

Most negotiation training ignores this. It teaches the tactics without accounting for who is using them.

Negotiating like a woman doesn't mean negotiating softly. It means seeing the game you're actually in — one where the rules aren't applied evenly — and choosing your strategy with that in full view. Sometimes that means being direct, anchoring hard, and letting a silence sit. Sometimes it means framing an ask so that saying yes is easy for the person who has to defend it upstairs.

Often, there's far more you can unlock where you are. Sometimes, though, the honest answer is that you've reached the ceiling of what your current environment will offer you. Knowing which situation you're in changes the strategy.

What could that gap add up to?

Think of a conversation, past or present — one where you might have secured more, or didn't realise there was anything to secure. At the time, the difference probably looked modest.

But a lower starting point can follow you. When later rises build on it, the gap compounds.

And that's one conversation.

Now think about a whole career — every review, offer, promotion and opportunity where the outcome could have been different.

And that's only the money. Negotiating well can also change the authority you have, the opportunities you're offered, the time you keep for yourself and the decisions you get to influence.

I knew the theory. Something was still missing.

I'm Lucy Watson, founder of Negotiate Like a Woman. I've spent 25+ years in financial services and technology — including at Barclays and Oliver Wyman, and as co-founder of an enterprise technology company.

Along the way, I've negotiated as an employee, leader, co-founder, supplier and customer. I have an INSEAD MBA. I took every negotiation elective they offered.

And yet, a few years ago, I walked out of a negotiation feeling utterly dejected — like I'd been kicked in the stomach.

Trying to understand why led me into the research on women and negotiation — and to something nobody had ever taught me: the same behaviour can land differently coming from a woman.

Knowing the mechanics wasn't enough. I needed to understand the negotiation I was actually in: where I had leverage, who really mattered, how gender and relationships changed the dynamics, what was worth pushing for — and when something simply wasn't going to move.

I also started recognising far more of the negotiations happening every day: over scope, credit, time, visibility, opportunity and influence — long before anyone sits down for "a negotiation".

I'm a much better negotiator now. Not because I win every negotiation. I don't. I leave far less to chance.

My full story is in the brochure.

Closing The Gap is the programme I wish I'd had twenty years earlier.

I would rather lie on a bed of nails than negotiate my pay. Lucy helped me through the whole process — and I secured a £38k p.a. increase.Senior leader, financial services

Women whose contribution isn't coming back to them.

• You've been doing work that's visibly above your grade, and it hasn't translated into anything.
• You've been told "next year" more than once.
• You've watched someone less capable be promoted, and been asked to be pleased about it.
• You're respected. You're also underpaid, and everyone including you knows it.
• Or the money is fine, and what you actually want is more authority, autonomy or a role that leaves room for a life outside work.

It's about the size of the gap between what you contribute and what comes back — and whether you're ready to do something deliberate about it.

It isn't for you if you'd rather watch than take part, if you want someone to do it for you, or if you'd rather not look at your own part in it.

A personal board of directors, not an audience.

There are no more than eight women in Closing The Gap — deliberately.

Over the year, the group gets to know your context: what you're negotiating, the history behind it, the patterns you're trying to change and what's coming next.

So when something significant is in play, you're not explaining your career from scratch to a roomful of strangers. You're drawing on a small group of women who already understand the context — and can challenge your thinking.

Think of it less as a cohort, and more as a personal board of directors for the negotiations shaping your career.

£3,500

Or ten monthly payments of £375.

Twelve months. No more than eight women. One significant negotiation, handled better, can repay the investment on its own.

How to apply

1. Apply. About five minutes.
2. We talk. A short conversation to work out whether this is genuinely right for you, and for you to ask whatever you'd like to ask. If it isn't right, I'll say so.
3. Join. Choose how you'd like to pay, and you're in.

Applications reviewed as they arrive. Applications close 9 October.

Apply for a place

Download the brochure

Everything above, in detail — the full programme structure, the session plan, what's included, and how the year runs.