The myth of the male negotiator: Gender’s effect on negotiation strategies and outcomes

Abstract

Conventional wisdom holds that women are worse negotiators than men. However, in an incentivized negotiation with explicit verbal communication, we find that women perform equally well compared to men, contrary to a control game without communication where men perform better. This is driven by men’s underperformance against male partners, and more specifically when they know their partner is male. Using chat transcripts to classify the negotiation approaches used, we show that men over-use aggressive negotiation strategies against known male partners, increasing mis-match and reducing their payoffs. Due to this, male-male pairs capture significantly less value than any other pair type. In contrast, female negotiators create joint gains without reducing their individual payoffs. Our findings suggest that verbal communication may trigger “toxic masculinity” that undoes men’s advantage in one-shot non-communication games.