Perceptions of wage entitlement differ between women and men such that men are more likely to feel worthy of higher pay while women's sense of wage entitlement is depressed. Women's beliefs about their relatively lower worth and their depressed wage entitlement reflects their lower social status such that when women's status is raised, their wage entitlement raises as well. However, gender-related status manipulation has no impact on men's elevated wage entitlement. Even when men's status is lowered on a specific task (e.g., by telling them that women typically outperform men on this task), men do not reduce their self-pay and respond with elevated projections of their own competence. The usual pattern whereby men assign themselves more pay than women for comparable work might explain why men tend to initiate negotiations more than women.