Men tend to achieve better economic results in negotiation than women, negotiation research studies have found overall. Such gender differences are generally small, but evidence from the business world suggests that they can add up over time, and if you want to narrow the gender gap in negotiation, there are strategies you can employ. If men ask for and receive slightly higher starting salaries than women, for example, and continue to negotiate more assertively for themselves over the course their careers, the gender gap can add up to millions of dollars over time.
The gender gap in negotiation may in part explain why women in the United States earned only about 83% of men’s median annual earnings in 2021, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Also, “Compared to the median weekly earnings of White men working full-time, Hispanic women’s full-time earnings were just 58.4 percent, Black women’s 63.1 percent, and White women’s 79.6 percent.”
Claim your FREE copy: Business Negotiation Strategies: How to Negotiate Better Business Deals
Discover step-by-step techniques for avoiding common business negotiation pitfalls when you download a copy of the FREE special report, Business Negotiation Strategies: How to Negotiate Better Business Deals, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
Deeply ingrained societal gender roles lie at the root of the gender gap in negotiated outcomes, researchers have concluded. In many cultures, girls are encouraged and expected to be accommodating, concerned with the welfare of others, and relationship-oriented from an early age. Notably, these goals clash with the more assertive behaviors considered to be essential for negotiation success, which is more in line with societal expectations that boys and men be competitive, assertive, and profit-oriented. As a result, women may be uncomfortable negotiating forcefully on their own behalf, a tendency that’s supported by evidence suggesting they face a social backlash in the workplace for doing so.
How can women and the organizations that employ them narrow the gender gap in negotiation results? In a study in the Psychological Bulletin, Jens Mazei of the University of Münster and his colleagues analyzed 51 past studies that compared women and men’s negotiation results with the goal of determining whether women can capitalize on certain characteristics of negotiation to improve their outcomes.
In addition to confirming with their analysis that the gender gap between women and men’s negotiation performance is indeed narrow, the team identified several types of negotiation that reduce the gap or give women an advantage over men.
The findings point to several concrete suggestions for women negotiators, all of which their organizations can capitalize on as well:
View Yourself as an Agent for your Organization.
Women negotiate more assertively for other individuals, such as their employees, than they do for themselves, research finds. Because negotiating for others is a communal behavior consistent with the traditional female gender role, women may feel more comfortable pushing harder for others than they do for themselves, researchers argue. Consequently, in negotiations for other people, women effectively narrow the gender gap in negotiated outcomes. Notably, however, women achieve lower economic results, on average, relative to men when they are representing an organization in their negotiations. Women may be able to avoid a social backlash and narrow this gap by viewing themselves as advocates for their organizations and pointing to their organization’s needs during negotiations.
Capitalize on Training and Experience to Narrow the Gender Gap in Negotiation.
Across the studies they examined, Jens Mazei and his team found that the gap between men and women’s outcomes narrowed as they gained negotiating experience.
The results suggest that women in particular tend to achieve more favorable economic outcomes the more time they spend at the bargaining table. This might because they develop a stronger sense of the protocol of appropriate behavior specific to the situation and/or because they tend to shed traditional gender expectations as they gain experience.
Whatever the case, the results suggest that women, in particular, should benefit from negotiation training and experience.
Prepare, Prepare, Prepare.
Gender differences in economic outcomes tend to be smaller when negotiators receive information about the bargaining range in a negotiation simulation, past research has found.
It appears that when women have access to information about upper and lower limits, they may “rely less on preconceived gender roles as guidelines for their behavior in negotiations,” Mazei and colleagues argue. Although thorough preparation is always important in negotiation, women, in particular, may be able to capitalize on this result by researching the typical salary range in a field, for example, and then, to avoid a social backlash, referencing these standards during their negotiations.
What do you think about the gender gap in negotiation? Is there anything we missed?
Related Article: Negotiating Salary: Confronting the Gender Pay Gap
Claim your FREE copy: Business Negotiation Strategies: How to Negotiate Better Business Deals
Discover step-by-step techniques for avoiding common business negotiation pitfalls when you download a copy of the FREE special report, Business Negotiation Strategies: How to Negotiate Better Business Deals, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
“Compared to the median weekly earnings of White men working full-time, Hispanic women’s full-time earnings were just 58.4 percent, Black women’s 63.1 percent, and White women’s 79.6 percent.” Apart from action that the article recommends to redress male-female imbalance, it also seems that White women need to take specific action in support of Hispanic and Black women. Also, what are the comparative full-time earnings of White women and Black men?
This article misses the research that shows that women negotiators get penalized for negotiating more assertively “like a man” because they are deviating from gender stereotypes, often getting worse outcomes rather than better ones. So “fixing women” won’t fix the problem. Instead, we all have to become more aware of our biases and try to stop perpetrating them. Wouldn’t it be nice if men could be encouraged to negotiate in a more traditionally “feminine” way, identifying more opportunities for win/win because they are taking into consideration the needs of the other party rather than trying to achieve their own interests at all costs.
Couldn’t agree more Charlotte, and we have the wonderful insights from neuroscience coming to the fore now. Why on earth aren’t we looking to educate BOTH genders in our physiological differences and use these understandings to successfully progress and interact to maximise outcomes. We need to start with basics to enable us to move forward.
who are the women negotiating with? Men or women? I would expect mostly men which is why women has to negotiate like men rather than as women! Is that a reasonable request? In so many ways women keep being told to change to be more like men. That is not right. The leaders of today’s companies has to learn to better appreciate and respect different ways of negotiating. What might the picture look like if 85-90% of top management and board members were women? Would it then be the men being told to change their skills to suit the female way?
We have got to move on to a higher level of this discussion about gender differences. We have got to learn more about different kind of people and not try to make everyone the same. Businesses are losing too much talent from all the groups of people who do not fit into the stereotype male way. Once gone that talent rarely return. We need a cultural change at the top rather than from below the top. Today’s leaders need to open their eyes and really see what they are missing out on and start leading from a much broader base of knowledge about human beings across the board.