What If Women Aren't Actually Worse Negotiators?
A new study challenges one of the most persistent explanations for the gender pay gap — and suggests we've been measuring negotiation success all wrong.
If you’ve ever had a conversation about the gender pay gap, you’ve probably heard an oft-cited belief that part of the gap is attributable to the idea that women just don’t negotiate as well as men. Women are more likely to undersell themselves. They’re just not as tough as men when it comes to asking for what they want.
But is this actually true? Or is it just an explanation some people use to make inequality feel more palatable?
New research conducted by academics at Cornell University provides a fresh answer. According to a series of studies involving more than 2,000 participants, women are just as effective as men at negotiating economic outcomes — like salaries and bonuses, but also the price of goods and services. But in addition to that, women also tend to leave their negotiating partner feeling better about the interaction.
The research found that while men and women reached comparable financial outcomes, people — regardless of gender — consistently reported higher levels of trust, rapport and satisfaction after negotiating with women. They were also more likely to say they wanted to negotiate with that person again.
That preference even persisted in experiments in which participants didn't know whether the person on the other side of the negotiation was a man or a woman, suggesting the effect stemmed from negotiating style rather than gender stereotypes alone.
“Early research from the 1970s and 1980s focused on gender as a stable predictor of negotiation outcomes, suggesting that women performed worse in negotiating,” Charlotte Townsend, a fellow at Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations and a lead author of the research, wrote. “But that has changed over time. Our data shows that women are achieving equivalent economic outcomes, and better relational outcomes, compared to men,” she added.
Townsend and her colleagues conducted a series of separate studies. The first analyzed more than 2,000 observations from MBA students participating in structured face-to-face negotiation exercises. Women were consistently rated more highly for building trust, communicating effectively, listening and creating value for both sides.
Another analysis examined anonymous online negotiations. That one found that women were still viewed more favorably even when their gender remained unknown to their negotiating partners.
A final experiment found that women were more likely to accept a reasonable offer once it had been made. That, in turn, led to more positive feelings from their negotiating partners. That study also found, however, that women were not accepting deals earlier in the process or making worse deals than their male counterparts.
Amy Diehl, a gender equity researcher and co-author of “Glass Walls: Shattering the Six Gender Bias Barriers Still Holding Women Back at Work,” said the findings underscore the value of what researchers describe as “relational work” — the effort people put into building trust during negotiations. “This sort of work adds direct value, as it gets the economic outcome and increases goodwill with the other side,” she said.
Beyond debunking an old trope about gender differences in the workplace, this new research challenges us more broadly to rethink how success in negotiations is measured. Traditionally, negotiation research has focused almost exclusively on who extracts the biggest financial gain. But negotiations are usually about much more than a single transaction. They shape trust, future opportunities and ongoing working relationships. Indeed, they can determine the chemistry between individuals for years to come.
“Economic outcomes are only half the story,” Townsend said. “The other half is whether people want to work with you again.”
If that's right, then one of the most enduring — and simplistic — explanations for the gender pay gap begins to look increasingly shaky. The findings don't suggest that negotiation plays no role in workplace inequality. It almost certainly does. But is it fair to say that women are worse negotiators than men? Absolutely not. And more fundamentally, perhaps we've been measuring success too narrowly all along.
