Silence Is Not a Signal: The Biology of Asking for a Pay Rise
Here is a simple probability problem. If you ask for a pay rise, you have roughly a 6 in 10 chance of getting one. If you don't ask, you have a 0 in 10 chance.
This isn't speculation. In 2022, YouGov surveyed more than 16,000 UK adults about salary negotiations. Only 40% had ever asked for a pay rise—46% of men and just 33% of women. But of those who did ask, roughly two-thirds succeeded. The gap between men and women narrowed dramatically once both actually made the request: 68% success for men, 63% for women.
The difference between earning more and earning the same isn't talent, tenure, or timing. It's transmission. Signals that aren't sent produce exactly zero response.
The Signaling Void
In biology, organisms that need resources must signal that need. This is so fundamental it barely seems worth stating—until you realize how many humans violate it daily in their careers.
Prairie dogs have evolved one of the most sophisticated alarm call systems in the animal kingdom. Different calls encode different threats: a hawk overhead sounds different from a coyote approaching, which sounds different from a human walking nearby. The calls are metabolically expensive to produce and attract predator attention to the caller. But prairie dogs that remain silent when they spot danger don't get eaten less—they just fail to warn their colony.
The business parallel is uncomfortable. Employees who remain silent about their compensation don't avoid awkward conversations—they simply ensure the conversation never happens. And conversations that don't happen have a 0% success rate.
Why Silence Persists
If the math is so obvious—65% beats 0%—why do 60% of workers never ask?
The answer involves a phenomenon biologists call urgency inversion. In functional animal groups, alarm signals intensify as threats increase. When gibbons face territorial threat, their calls get louder and more insistent. When prairie dogs detect predators, alarm calls sharpen and multiply.
But in human hierarchies, the opposite often occurs. The more important something is, the quieter people get. Subordinates who would loudly debate lunch plans become whisper-quiet when discussing their careers. The stakes go up; the volume goes down. This is backwards.
The biological principle: critical signals should intensify, not diminish, under stress. Yet career conversations—among the highest-stakes discussions most employees ever have—often get softened into oblivion or avoided entirely.
The Costly Signal Advantage
There's a reason asking feels uncomfortable. In biology, that discomfort is actually the point.
The tungara frog produces a mating call that attracts females—and predatory bats. The call is metabolically expensive to produce and literally risks the frog's life. This is not a design flaw. It's the mechanism that makes the signal credible. A signal that anyone can fake carries no information. The cost is the credential.
Asking your boss for a pay rise is uncomfortable. You might be rejected. You might damage the relationship. You might look presumptuous. These costs are precisely what makes the request credible. An employee willing to endure discomfort for a conversation signals something important: they believe they're worth it.
Contrast this with the employee who hints, who waits to be noticed, who assumes good work speaks for itself. These are cheap signals—low cost, low information content, and easily ignored. The discomfort you're avoiding isn't a bug to be engineered away. It's the signal itself.
The Preparation Protocol
Biology also teaches us that effective signals require structure. The tungara frog's call has specific frequency patterns that carry information. Prairie dog alarms encode threat type, size, and direction. Random noise carries nothing.
Career negotiations work the same way. A vague "I'd like more money" is noise. A structured request is signal.
Know your market rate. Look up salary ranges for your role on platforms like Glassdoor or Robert Half. Call a recruiter and ask: "If I left my job tomorrow, what would someone with my experience earn?" This isn't disloyalty. It's calibration.
Bring evidence, not assertions. "I work hard" is noise. "I delivered Project X, which saved £50,000" is signal. Projects you've completed, problems you've solved, revenue generated or costs cut—these are the frequency patterns that carry information.
Structure the conversation. Ask for a meeting about "my progression and compensation." Don't ambush. Give your manager time to prepare so the conversation can be productive rather than defensive.
When they say no, ask for the map. The response to rejection isn't retreat—it's reconnaissance. "What specifically would I need to accomplish in the next 6-12 months to earn this raise?" Get it in writing. Do the work. Document it. Return with evidence.
This is quorum sensing applied to careers. You're establishing the threshold, then methodically working to cross it.
The Gender Signal Gap
The YouGov data reveals something important: the gap between men and women isn't primarily in success rates when asking (68% vs 63%). It's in asking at all (46% vs 33%).
Women are 28% less likely than men to initiate the conversation—but only 7% less likely to succeed once they do. The barrier isn't the request being rejected. The barrier is the request never being made.
This suggests the problem isn't discrimination in response to signals. It's asymmetric signaling behavior. And asymmetric signaling, in biology, produces asymmetric resource distribution.
The solution isn't to make asking easier—the discomfort is the credibility. The solution is to recognize that the discomfort is worth enduring because the alternative (silence) has a known return: zero.
The Compound Effect
A single pay rise doesn't just affect one year's earnings. It compounds.
Consider two employees who start at the same salary. One asks for and receives a 5% raise in year one. The other stays silent. Even if both receive identical percentage increases for the next twenty years, the first employee's cumulative lifetime earnings will be meaningfully higher—often by six figures over a career.
In evolutionary terms, this is fitness advantage through signaling. The frog that calls more effectively doesn't just mate once—it establishes a pattern that compounds across breeding seasons. The employee who signals effectively doesn't just earn more this year—they reset the baseline from which all future earnings compound.
2026: The Year of the Signal
This is the year to ask. Not with ultimatums. Not with threats. Not with the desperation of someone who's already decided to leave. With the structured, costly, credible signal of someone who believes they're worth it and can prove why.
The math hasn't changed: 65% beats 0%.
The only variable is whether you transmit the signal at all.
Related mechanisms: costly-signaling | alarm-calls | whisper-effect | quorum-sensing
Sources
- YouGov, "Pay rise and promotion survey," 2022. Survey of 16,175 GB adults.
- Zahavi, A. "Mate selection—a selection for a handicap." Journal of Theoretical Biology 53, no. 1 (1975): 205-214.
- Slobodchikoff, C.N. et al. "Semantic information distinguishing individual predators in the alarm calls of Gunnison's prairie dogs." Animal Behaviour 42, no. 5 (1991): 713-719.