Ahead of important business negotiations, women tend to hear the same advice: Be more assertive. Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want. Negotiate like a man.
Rebecca Ponce de Leon, an assistant professor of business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School, had doubts about this conventional wisdom. “I didn’t think the perspective that women are fundamentally worse at negotiating than men was nuanced enough,” she says. “We were curious about flipping this narrative on its head to see if there were situations where the tactics women tend to use are actually more beneficial.”
So Ponce de Leon and two colleagues set to work researching gender dynamics in negotiations. The results were illuminating, revealing that in certain scenarios, women may outperform men at the negotiating table — not despite their typically less assertive approach but because of it.
To gauge gender differences in negotiation outcomes, Ponce de Leon examined several business negotiation contexts using a mixed methods approach, relying on both observational data and a series of connected experiments to establish cause-and-effect relationships in the findings. For this study, the research team focused exclusively on distributive negotiations, where one party’s loss is the other’s gain — such as salary negotiations during a job interview.
Key takeaways from the research:
- Women tend to make less assertive first offers in negotiations. But despite an initially lower starting point, this less aggressive approach often leads to fewer impasses (i.e., failures to reach a deal) than with male negotiators.
- Women tend to outperform men in negotiations when they have weak alternatives, such as when a candidate interviewing for a role has no other job offers in hand. This performance advantage wanes when negotiators have strong alternatives, such as a competitive job offer from another company.
- Researchers attribute these findings to women having a stronger relational orientation — a greater focus on building rapport and maintaining positive relationships.
Learning from Entrepreneurial Pitches
The first phase of the research involved analyzing real-world data from the reality show Shark Tank. The research team parsed nine seasons of the show to meticulously code each contestant’s negotiation tactics based on their gender, the value of the opening offer, and whether or not a deal was reached.
“We also measured relational tactics that the entrepreneur used,” Ponce de Leon explains. “We had research assistants assess and code the extent to which entrepreneurs used relational self-disclosure — sharing personal and intimate information with the sharks — as well as their use of emotional appeals.” The researchers also recorded control variables including the masculinity or femininity of the product, the equity offered, and whether or not the entrepreneur was pitching as part of a team.
The findings from this phase were striking: Although women entrepreneurs tended to give less assertive first offers, they were also less likely than their male counterparts to reach an impasse — meaning they were more likely to secure a deal with one of the sharks.
Examining the Role of Alternatives
Next, the researchers conducted a simulation experiment to assess the boundary condition of BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) or an alternative deal value.
In this phase, 395 participants were assigned the role of a job candidate negotiating with an HR manager, with some given a strong alternative offer (another job offer valued at $85,000) and others a weak one (no other job offers). They were presented with a range of salary options and instructed to negotiate for the highest salary possible. The computer was programmed to simulate an HR manager’s response and provide counteroffers — and, as in real life, the participants didn’t know how many rounds of negotiation would occur.
In this simulation, only 9 percent of women reached an impasse, compared to 19 percent of men. The findings in this portion of the study were consistent with the Shark Tank observations: Women tended to make less assertive initial offers than men, but they were also less likely to reach an impasse. As a result, in general, women performed better than men when they had weaker alternatives — in this case, no backup job offer. There were minimal differences in outcomes when men and women had strong alternatives.
Real-World Implications
In both the Shark Tank context and the simulation, the researchers attributed the observed advantage to women’s stronger display of relational orientation — a propensity to be attuned to relationships and express high levels of affiliation or communality. The bottom line? “The way we treat others can be lucrative,” says Ponce de Leon.
Another key takeaway from this research — for both men and women — is to be strategic at the negotiating table. “You need to think about how aggressive you can realistically be based on the alternatives you have in your back pocket,” says Ponce de Leon. “Rather than trying to squeeze the other party as much as you can under every circumstance, you need to evaluate your position.”
In other words, if you have a great backup offer, you can afford to push a little harder. But if you don’t have a strong alternative, you might want to modulate your assertiveness and tune in more to the person on the other side of the table.
This type of situational and relational awareness is transferable to other business contexts, says Ponce de Leon. “Most of our interactions end up being a negotiation of some sort, like if you’re leading a team and need to ask someone above you for resources — really, any situation where you want something from someone and they want something from you, and you need to figure out how to meet in the middle.”
Ponce de Leon’s work also challenges the notion that women need to negotiate more “like men” to succeed. “There’s this stereotype that women are bad at negotiating for all these various reasons: They just don’t ask, or when they do, they experience backlash,” she says. “This can be really damaging. It can make women blame themselves or diminish their confidence.”
Instead, she says, that age-old advice is not only outdated but often counterproductive to business objectives. “Relationships are something you need to consider in the workplace — maybe especially in the workplace,” she says. “It's a really important idea that the behaviors we tend to disparage as weak can actually be valuable and that communality has a place at work.”
Adapted from “Asking for Less (but Receiving More): Women Avoid Impasses and Outperform Men When Negotiators Have Weak Alternatives” by Rebecca Ponce de Leon, assistant professor of business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School; Anyi Ma, assistant professor of Management at the Wisconsin School of Business at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and Ashleigh Shelby Rosette, the James L. Vincent Professor of Leadership at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.
