Study: People Trust Women More At The Negotiating Table

Why People Would Rather Negotiate With a Woman, Even When the Deal Comes Out the Same

When people sit down to hammer out a deal, they’d rather be across the table from a woman. Not because women cave to demands or give away the store, but because negotiating with them simply feels better. And that feeling, it turns out, has real financial consequences that build up over time.

A new set of research published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that people consistently preferred negotiating with women over men across five studies. In the MBA-course data, women partners were rated higher on trust-building, fairness, listening, and communication. That preference held up even in anonymous online negotiations, where the other person’s gender was completely hidden. Men and women ended up with similar financial results. The difference showed up in how people felt about the experience.

That distinction matters more than it might seem. Researchers have long focused on who wins the most money in a negotiation. But the emotional and social side of a deal, including whether to trust the other person and whether to work with them again, shapes who gets called back for the next deal. Over time, those repeat opportunities can add up to a real financial advantage.

Five Studies, One Clear Pattern in Women’s Social Negotiating Advantage

Drawing on an existing dataset from a full-time MBA-level negotiation course, researchers captured over 2,000 observations from 231 students. Each week, students completed face-to-face practice negotiations and then filled out surveys rating their randomly assigned partners on trust-building, fairness, listening, and communication. Women partners received higher ratings across nearly every social measure. Participants said they would want to negotiate again with the same partner 94.4 percent of the time when that partner was a woman, compared to 91.9 percent when the partner was a man.

A second study used data from a separate set of online negotiations in which participants chatted anonymously to divide fictional campfire supplies. Because conversations were text-based and names were hidden, there was no obvious way to tell if the person on the other end was a man or a woman. A pretest confirmed that a new group of readers shown the chat transcripts could not guess negotiators’ genders at better-than-chance rates. Despite that anonymity, women partners were still rated as more likable, and greater liking predicted greater satisfaction with the negotiation, even after accounting for financial outcomes.

Do Stereotypes Explain the Women’s Negotiating Preference?

One obvious explanation is that society already expects women to be warm and friendly, so they get credit simply for meeting those expectations. The researchers wanted to know whether stereotypes were doing all the work, or whether women’s actual behavior was driving the preference.

To test this, a third study showed participants written transcripts of the same anonymous online chat negotiations with a twist. Some were told their partner was a woman, some were told their partner was a man, and some received no gender information. Randomly assigning a gender label, regardless of who actually wrote the messages, did not change how much participants liked that partner. Women’s real behavior, not assumptions about their gender, appeared to be generating the preference in this design, though the authors note this does not rule out any role for stereotypes entirely.

A fourth study used a more detailed satisfaction measure tracking feelings about the relationship, the negotiation process, the outcome, and how the experience made each person feel about themselves. Women scored higher on all four dimensions. Participants also said they would prefer a woman partner whether that future negotiation was competitive, cooperative, or if they were simply choosing a teammate.

What Women Actually Do Differently at the Negotiating Table

A fifth and final study went line by line through the negotiation transcripts using an AI-assisted coding system to label each message by type, whether an offer, a question, an acceptance, or information-sharing, among other categories.

Two behaviors stood out. Women were more likely to accept offers; men were more likely to share information. Accepting offers was the behavior that most consistently explained why women’s partners felt better about the negotiation. An accepted offer signals that the other party listened, considered the proposal fair, and was ready to move forward. Women’s tendency to accept offers more readily did not hurt their financial results. Their outcomes were similar to men’s across the studies tested.

The Long Game: How Women’s Negotiating Edge Compounds Over Time

To show what this preference could mean over a career, the researchers ran a computer simulation based on their real-world data. They modeled what happens when a small but consistent gap, 94.4 percent versus 91.9 percent willingness to negotiate again, compounds across hundreds of interactions.

Under the model’s assumptions, women would accumulate roughly 45 percent more negotiation opportunities than men over the long run. Using a hypothetical scenario in which each successful negotiation is worth $10,000, the model projected that women would net an average of $178,451 compared to $123,501 for men, a gap of nearly $55,000 generated not by winning any individual deal, but by being the kind of partner people want to come back to. These figures are modeled projections, not directly observed earnings.

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Disclaimer: This article is based on observational and experimental research conducted in controlled or educational settings. Findings reflect statistical patterns across study samples and may not apply to all individuals, industries, or cultural contexts. The career earnings figures cited are modeled projections, not documented real-world outcomes.

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