Hannah Riley Bowles, HBS and Laura Kray, UC Berkeley: Negotiation is a Man’s Game: Ultimate Truth or Enduring Myth?

Hannah Riley Bowles
Laura Kray
The following are my notes from Bowles' & Kray's presentation at the HBS Gender & Work Conference, February 28, 2013.

There are three generations of research on gender and negotiations:

1.     Who has the advantage, men or women?

When she was a post-doc at Northwestern University, Kray kept getting asked by her MBA students, “Who has the advantage in negotiations, men or women?” She didn’t have an answer. So she passed the question back to the class, and their lay wisdom fell along the following lines: (1) men have the advantage because they don’t want to lose to women and (2) men have the advantage because they’re more competitive than women.

Initial research showed the following main effects for gender across studies:
  • Men were more likely to initiate negotiations, be more competitive, claim value for self, and to create value.
  • Women were more likely to engage in cooperative behavior, maintain higher ethical standards, and to be subjected to worse ethical treatment (such as being lied to).
  •  Men and women were similar in claiming value for others.
2.     When does gender matter (i.e., when do these effects occur)?

Research shows that gender matters more when:
  • The context is more ambiguous
  • Gender triggers are present (e.g., stereotype activation, role congruence with the task so that the negotiation is about a male-dominated or female-dominated task/outcome/role)
  • Power inequality (giving women power helps them in negotiation)
  • Social cues are present or salient (such as in face-to-face negotiations)
3.     Why do these differences persist?

Several potential explanations:
  • Testosterone vs. oxytocin?
  • How we study negotiation?
    •  We focus on male advantage in a paradigm that is inherently masculine, asking questions such as “why don’t women ask, or ask for more, or create more value?”
    • Answer: don’t blame the women, it’s complicated
    •  “It’s still a man’s world, women still aren’t making it” is the wrong framework (really a White male advantage when you look into it)
  • What “gender” effects are simply “status” effects?
    • Minority men seem to face similar constraints as White women – what is gender specific here?
  • Masculine paradigm: Kimmel et al. (1980) – “masculine” tasks and paradigm
    • Women perform the same as men when no gender triggers are present (see above)
    • Pissing women off by telling them women can’t negotiate makes them negotiate better than men
    • Saying women are better, women’s qualities are better, makes men perform better than women
Moving forward:

Focus on what women do (versus on what they don’t do)
  • Learn from successful women negotiators and all women
  • Study women's and men’s career negotiations
Study more diverse negotiators and negotiations
  • Bowles says she and Linda Babcock are finding the gender wage gap to be more about different occupations, the number of women in occupations, hours worked, and years of experience [seems inconsistent with economic research; see Blau & Kahn, 2007]
Broaden the concept of negotiation beyond economic outcomes and value. Look at:
  • Moral perspectives of negotiations
  • Relational perspectives
  • Organizational perspectives
What Alan Fiske referred to as the market pricing model is dominating the negotiation paradigm. Depends on egalitarian culture, what Michelle Gelfand refers to as conflict cultures, etc.

Discussion

William Bielby: Men and women have different anchors due to gender segregation in managerial etc. settings. For example Brenda Major’s entitlement research showed that when provided information about what others had paid themselves, gender differences went away.

Bowles & Kray: Linda Babcock and Michelle Gelfand found that men liken negotiating to playing a game, whereas women liken it to going to the dentist.

Catherine Benko at Deloitte: What about the experience of the negotiation itself as a type of value that gets created – what you remember, how the relationship between the parties is affected – are there differences between men and women along those lines?

Kray: The subjective value of negotiations has been slow to be recognized
[Jared Curhan & Hillary Elfenbein have work on this]

Bowles: There’s been some work showing that the social costs of asking for more pay are higher for women than for men [research by Maura Belliveau comes to mind]

Bowles: The main focus of negotiations research has been one-off interactions, not long-term consequences; such as for women in ongoing relationships in the real world

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Tale of Two Women -- Who Exercised Their Professional Independence

Image
May 2018, Vancouver BC Jody Wilson-Raybould’s story has triggered memories of professional trauma for me, like watching Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony last fall triggered memories of sexual trauma for many women. The way Wilson-Raybould has been treated represents a pattern of pressure applied to women who dare assert their professional independence, voice, and decision-making power. Most cases just aren’t made public. Wilson-Raybould and I were each welcomed to our professional appointments (as Attorney General of Canada and as Montalbano Professor of Leadership Studies: Gender and Diversity at UBC’s Sauder School of Business , respectively) with publicity and fanfare that celebrated diversity and the goodness of the White men who put us there. But when those men realized they couldn’t control how we carried out our professional duties, everything came crashing down. Each of us got in trouble for exercising our right to make independent judgments in our professional capaci
Read more

Jack Dovidio, Yale: Included but Invisible? The Benefits and Costs of Inclusion

Image
The following are my notes from Dovidio's talk at the  HBS Gender & Work Conference , February 28, 2013. Social inclusion is essential to equality. Discrimination is systematic exclusion. Exclusion is painful. But superficial inclusion cloaks injustice and takes the form of subtle contemporary bias. Contemporary bias: there are explicit attitudes about racism and sexism and there are implicit attitudes. Explicit and implicit attitudes are only weakly correlated. Most Americans (80%) say they're not racist or sexist [explicit attitudes], but 60-70% of the population is racist/sexist according to implicit measures of bias. Most people will rely on explicit attitudes when a situation is unambiguous, and when what needs to be done is absolutely clear. Most discrimination occurs when a situation is ambiguous (i.e., what is right and wrong behavior is not defined) or justifications are possible for racism and sexism (such as "merit"). Devine (1989) study of Black and
Read more

Peter Glick, Lawrence University: BS at Work: How Benevolent Sexism Undermines Women and Justifies Backlash

Image
The following are my notes from Glick 's  HBS Gender & Work Conference  presentation, February 28, 2013. “The battle of the sexes will never end -- there's too much fraternizing with the enemy” - Henry Kissinger Paradox: The interdependence of the sexes -- male dominance coexists with intimate dependence on women. Ambivalent sexism theory ( Glick & Fiske, 1996 ): Dominance & intimate interdependence lead to hostile sexism (HS, directed toward women who threaten male power) and benevolent sexism (BS, directed at women who conform to feminine ideals, serve men’s needs), respectively. Sample items of HS and BS . BS is a pedestal: A narrow and confined space, difficult to stay up on, especially in high heels. BS justifies HS, fosters unrecognized, patronizing discrimination, elicits backlash when resisted, saps women’s career ambitions, makes inequality more palatable. For men, BS protects self image, they can see themselves as not an oppressor, but rather as a provider
Read more