The secret weapon women bring to negotiations isn’t what you think

Study finds women are preferred negotiation partners even when gender is anonymous. (Credit: Pexels)

Negotiations are part of everyday life, whether it’s discussing a salary, deciding who does the dishes or haggling over the price of a used car.

New research co-authored by Cornell University and the University of California, Berkeley, and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggests that when those conversations take place, women may leave a stronger impression than men, even when both sides get similar results.

Across several studies involving more than 2,400 participants, researchers found that people reported more positive experiences when negotiating with women, describing greater trust, satisfaction and a stronger desire to negotiate with them again in the future.

“The main … finding is that people prefer to negotiate with women, even when it’s anonymous,” said Charlotte “Charlie” Townsend, one of the study‘s co-authors and a post-doctoral associate at Cornell, in an interview with CTVNews.ca.

‘Women are really excelling’

The findings challenge longstanding assumptions that women face disadvantages in negotiations and suggest they may possess strengths that are often overlooked. The study focused on what researchers call “subjective value,” the social and emotional consequences of a negotiation, such as trust, fairness, rapport and a willingness to negotiate with the same person again.

“There’s a lot of work ... that had really focused on economic outcomes and where women are kind of falling behind, and we were interested in an area in which women are really excelling,” Townsend said.

In one study, researchers analyzed more than 2,000 evaluations from students participating in a negotiation course. Participants rated their negotiation partners on several measures, including trust building, fairness, communication and listening skills.

Women received higher ratings across a range of those categories.

“We found again (that) women are liked more by their counterparts,” Townsend said. ”Their counterparts say that they trust them more, they find them more fair, better listeners, better communicators.”

Researchers found those strengths translated into a greater willingness among participants to negotiate with female partners again in the future.

To determine whether stereotypes were influencing perceptions, researchers also examined anonymous online negotiations where participants did not know the gender of the person they were negotiating with.

Even under those conditions, women were rated as more likeable and generated greater satisfaction among their negotiation partners.

Townsend said those results are pivotal.

“(It’s) really important that it survives anonymity because it suggests that these results are driven by behaviour, not perceptions. You’re not just stereotyping women,” she said.

Women make others feel ‘heard’ and ‘trusted’: analysis

A separate analysis confirmed that outside observers could not reliably identify a negotiator’s gender based only on the conversation, further suggesting stereotypes alone could not explain the findings.

The study also found no meaningful differences in economic outcomes between men and women.

“There doesn’t seem to be this kind of trade-off for likability. Women are performing as well economically, and then they’re kind of exceeding men in terms of these interpersonal outcomes,” Townsend said.

In a final study, researchers analyzed negotiation transcripts and found women were more likely to accept offers than men. That behaviour contributed to higher levels of liking and satisfaction among their negotiation partners.

However, women were not accepting deals earlier in the process, nor were they agreeing to worse outcomes than their male counterparts.

“It seems like the act of being the one to accept makes your partner feel like they’re really heard and trusted, and that you’ve built a good relationship with them,” Townsend said.