People prefer negotiating with women over men, study suggests

When engaging in negotiations, people tend to walk away more satisfied and eager for future interactions when their counterpart is a woman. Recent research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that women achieve the same financial outcomes as men while simultaneously fostering better interpersonal relationships. These relational strengths provide evidence that women excel in the social aspects of dealmaking, which could lead to compounded economic advantages over time.

A negotiation is essentially a discussion aimed at reaching an agreement where parties might have conflicting or shared interests. These conversations happen everywhere, ranging from formal job salary discussions to everyday debates about how to divide household chores. Past literature in this area often focused on the idea that men are naturally better bargainers. Much of that early work pointed to women initiating fewer negotiations and sometimes walking away with less money.

However, the landscape of bargaining has shifted. Modern data indicates that women now negotiate just as often as men and achieve similar financial results. While the financial side of a deal is easy to measure, the social and emotional consequences of a negotiation are equally important for long-term success. Scientists refer to this concept as subjective value, which encompasses feelings of trust, rapport, and overall satisfaction with the interpersonal process.

High subjective value often predicts whether a person wants to do business with someone again. In ongoing business relationships, repeat interactions tend to generate more revenue than a single aggressive deal. The authors initiated the current research to examine whether there is a gender difference in how much subjective value a person creates during a bargaining session. They also wanted to determine if any differences stem from actual behaviors at the bargaining table or merely from social stereotypes about women being warmer and more communal.

In the first of five studies, the researchers analyzed feedback data from a business school course involving 231 master of business administration students. Over ten weeks, the students participated in face-to-face bargaining roleplays, resulting in over 2,000 unique observations. After each session, the students rated their randomly assigned partners on several aspects of subjective value, while independent coders calculated the exact financial outcome of every completed deal.

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The authors found that people consistently rated women higher than men in areas like building trust, listening attentively, and satisfying their partner’s needs. Participants indicated they would want to work with their female partners again in 94.4 percent of cases, compared to 91.9 percent for male partners. Importantly, there was no measurable difference in the financial outcomes achieved by men and women.

To see if these effects persisted when participants could not see each other, the scientists examined a second dataset featuring 846 individuals engaging in anonymous online chat negotiations. In these text-based exercises, participants negotiated the distribution of fictional camping supplies to earn a real performance-based cash bonus. After the chat ended, the participants rated how much they liked their partner and how satisfied they were with the deal.

Even though the participants did not know the gender of the person on the other side of the screen, they reported liking female partners significantly more than male partners. This increased liking translated into higher overall satisfaction with the agreement. Just as in the first experiment, the economic outcomes for men and women were virtually identical. The researchers even ran a pretest with 180 undergraduate students, verifying that outside observers could not accurately guess the gender of the individuals based solely on reading the chat logs.

The third study aimed to separate actual behavior from perceived stereotypes. The authors recruited 773 participants from an online platform to read five randomly selected chat transcripts from the previous study. The participants were instructed to imagine they were one of the people in the chat. The researchers manipulated the experiment by either providing no gender information, labeling the partner as a man, or labeling the partner as a woman.

The actual gender of the person who originally typed the messages predicted how they were perceived. When reading transcripts written by women, the participants rated the partner as warmer and more competent, regardless of what gender label the scientists attached to the transcript. Participants reading women’s words also reported greater satisfaction and a higher desire to negotiate with that person in the future. This provides evidence that actual behavioral differences, rather than simple stereotyping, drive the preference for female negotiators.

A fourth experiment involving 371 online participants tested whether this preference extended to different types of future interactions. Using the same chat transcripts with no gender labels provided, the participants answered a comprehensive questionnaire designed to measure subjective value. The questionnaire assessed feelings about the relationship, the negotiation process, themselves, and the final outcome.

Once again, the transcripts belonging to women generated much higher subjective value scores across all categories. The participants expressed a stronger desire to have the female participants as teammates in the future. They also strongly preferred the women as counterparts in both cooperative, win-win scenarios and competitive, win-lose scenarios.

To identify exactly what women were doing differently to generate such positive feelings, the scientists used artificial intelligence software to code the specific behaviors in the chat transcripts. The software categorized every single sentence as a specific action, such as providing information, asking a question, or accepting an offer.

The analysis showed that women were significantly more likely to accept offers during the dialogue. Men, on the other hand, spent more time providing information. The statistical models revealed that the act of accepting offers was the primary behavior that made the female partners more likable and increased their counterpart’s satisfaction. Importantly, women were not accepting worse deals; they simply agreed to terms that worked for both sides, securing the same financial points as the men.

To demonstrate how this preference affects real life, the researchers ran a mathematical simulation based on their findings. The model suggested that because people want to work with women more often, female professionals would experience roughly 44.5 percent more future negotiation opportunities than men. Over time, these extra opportunities could compound into massive financial gains, giving women a distinct long-term economic advantage.

While these findings provide evidence of a female advantage in dealmaking, there are some limitations to consider. The experiments took place in highly structured, low-ambiguity environments where the rules and expectations were explicitly stated. In real-world situations where the appropriateness of negotiating is less obvious, the gender dynamics might operate differently.

Another potential misinterpretation is that prioritizing relationships always leads to equal financial success. In some contexts, focusing entirely on making the other person happy could cause a bargainer to settle for less money. The current data simply indicates that women manage to balance both, creating positive feelings without sacrificing their own economic interests.

Future research should explore these dynamics in high-stakes professional environments to see if the findings generalize beyond students and online participants. Scientists might also look into other specific behavioral differences beyond offer acceptance that contribute to a person’s subjective value. Exploring how reputation compounds over years of repeated business deals could shed more light on the long-term financial benefits of being a highly liked negotiator.

The study, “People prefer to negotiate with women, even when outcomes are identical and gender is unknown,” was authored by Charlotte H. Townsend, Laura J. Kray, and Solène Delecourt. It was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.