Men and women achieve similar economic outcomes in negotiations, but female negotiators foster stronger interpersonal relationships, which lead in turn to greater satisfaction with the result and a greater desire to negotiate with that woman again in the future.
In a series of studies with over 2,000 participants, researchers found that people consistently reported better subjective outcomes – feelings of trust, rapport and willingness to engage again – when negotiating with women.
“So much of negotiation research has really focused on men’s advantages,” said Charlotte “Charlie” Townsend, a Future of Work fellow in the ILR School’s Department of Organizational Behavior. “But if women are creating better relationship outcomes in negotiations, it makes a lot of sense that their partners would like to negotiate with them more than with men.”
Townsend is the author of “People Prefer to Negotiate with Women, Even When Outcomes Are Identical and Gender is Unknown,” published June 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The paper is co-authored by Laura J. Kray and Solene Delecourt, both of the Hass School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Across five studies, the authors found that negotiation partners liked women more than men, which increased partner satisfaction and heightened the desire to negotiate with women again, even when negotiators did not know their partner’s gender. Importantly, they found that contrary to previously held beliefs, women achieved economic outcomes on par with men, suggesting that greater likability does not come at a performance cost, and further, it may provide women with more opportunities to negotiate, which compound into economic gains.
“Early research from the 1970s and 1980s focused on gender as a stable predictor of negotiation outcomes, suggesting that women performed worse in negotiating, but that has changed over time,” Townsend said. “Our data shows that women are achieving equivalent economic outcomes, and better relational outcomes, compared to men.”
In their first study, the researchers used an archival dataset of over 2,000 observations from a full-time MBA negotiation course. In this course, students completed face-to-face negotiation role-playing exercises and then evaluated their partners on subjective value. The results showed that people rated women higher in building trust, fairness, satisfying their partner’s needs, expanding the pie (i.e., creating opportunity), communicating and listening.
The second study examined partner-based gender effects in anonymous online negotiations. Partners took part in an online negotiation, in which they were randomly paired and could communicate via chat to reach a deal. The results showed that even when negotiators’ gender remained unidentified, women partners were more liked, which predicted greater satisfaction, independent of economic outcomes.
The researchers then investigated whether actual or perceived gender would more strongly predict subjective value. Participants read recreated chat negotiations using the same dialogues as in Study 2, imagining they were participating in the negotiations. They either read dialogues with no gender information or dialogues in which their counterpart was randomly assigned a gender.
They found that actual gender, not perceived, was predictive of subjective value. Female partners were rated higher on warmth and competence and were better-liked, leading participants to report greater satisfaction with the outcome and to want to negotiate again. Another study replicated this effect and showed that people were more likely to want women as their teammates and counterparts in competitive and cooperative negotiations.
In the final study, the researchers used an AI model to code a handful of different behaviors in a negotiation transcript and found that women were more likely to accept an offer, which led to more positive feelings from their partners. However, they also found that women were not accepting deals earlier in the process or making worse deals than their male counterparts.
“We don’t talk enough about the social consequences in negotiations, and the importance of how your partner makes you feel,” Townsend said. “We tried to show there are important downstream consequences. It’s really about building relationships with people.
“When it comes to negotiations, people often think about getting the best deal in economic terms, but relationships have important consequences, and I think this work demonstrates that women have a real strength that we should be considering more, and that we can all learn from.”
Julie Greco is the director of communications for the ILR School.
