Negotiating Femininity: Gender Identity Affects Women’s Outcomes in Negotiations

Abstract

Despite extensive research on gender and negotiation outcomes, the role of gender identity is less well understood. Across three behavioral studies, we demonstrate that gender identity plays an important role in women’s decisions about negotiation, and that gender identity relevant priming improves women’s performance in competitive negotiations. We show that a situational moderator (the gendered nature of the negotiation topic) affects negotiation decisions for women with strong feminine identities, but not for women with weak feminine identities. Likewise, the gender gap in the decision to negotiate about a masculine topic was driven by the difference between men versus women with strong feminine identities. Subsequently, we tested two gender identity relevant primes, one that highlighted the benefits of feminine identity and one that made masculine traits accessible. In both cases, women performed better in the prime conditions, with the male advantage typically seen ameliorated, than when no primes we...