Negotiating with women builds more trust, even though men and women achieve nearly identical economic outcomes at the bargaining table. Men and women walk away from negotiations with similarly good deals, but their partners do not walk away feeling the same way about them. Negotiating partners consistently like women more, trust them more, and express a stronger willingness to negotiate with them again than they do men. That is the central finding of a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The researchers describe this difference in interpersonal evaluations as “subjective value,” and they found that it persisted even when participants had no idea whether they were negotiating with a man or a woman.
Negotiation Research Has Mostly Measured Deals, Not Relationships
Negotiations happen constantly, in job offers, salary talks, household chores, and everyday price haggling. Most prior research asked a narrow question: who walks away with the better deal. The authors argue that this focus leaves out something that matters for long-term outcomes — whether people want to work with the same negotiating partner again. A negotiation that produces a fair deal but leaves one side annoyed or distrustful can close off future opportunities, even if the numbers look identical to a friendlier exchange.
Earlier Work on Gender and Negotiation Focused on Who Gets the Better Deal
Research from the 1970s and 1980s treated gender as a fixed predictor of negotiation performance, often concluding that women came away with worse economic outcomes than men. Charlotte H. Townsend, the study’s lead author and a Future of Work fellow in Cornell University’s ILR School Department of Organizational Behavior, said this framing has shaped the field for decades even as evidence around it shifted. Her team wanted to look past the deal itself and ask a different question: how partners feel about the person they negotiated with, and whether that feeling differs by gender.
Five Experiments Tested Real and Randomly Assigned Gender in Negotiation Chats
The researchers ran five studies involving more than 2,400 participants. They combined archival negotiation data, controlled experiments, and coded transcripts. In several studies, participants negotiated directly with a partner through online text chat. Afterward, the researchers recorded each participant’s self-identified gender. In other studies, third-party observers read recreated versions of the same chat transcripts and rated the negotiators. Some observers saw gender labels attached to the transcripts, while others received no gender information.
A separate condition randomly assigned a gender label to each transcript. This design allowed the researchers to isolate the effect of a gender label from the influence of a negotiator’s actual gender and behavior. One study recruited 800 U.S. participants through the Prolific platform. Following the study’s preregistration, researchers excluded participants who reported not reading the conversations carefully, leaving 773 participants for analysis. Each participant read a random set of five negotiation conversations and imagined themselves as one of the two negotiating parties.
Liking, Trust and Desire to Negotiate Again Rose Consistently for Women Partners
Across the five studies, negotiators rated as women received higher scores than men on liking, trust, perceived fairness, and satisfaction with the outcome. Partners also reported a stronger desire to negotiate with the same woman again in the future. This pattern appeared even in the anonymous condition, where participants could not see or infer their partner’s gender from the conversation. Researchers also measured perceptions of warmth and competence and found women scored higher on both, again regardless of whether a gender label was attached to the transcript. Despite these interpersonal advantages, the studies found no meaningful gender gap in economic outcomes: women reached deals on par with men’s by standard negotiation measures, and they did not accept offers earlier or settle for worse terms than their male counterparts.
To explain the pattern, the researchers analyzed transcripts of the negotiations and assigned a behavioral code to each turn of conversation. One behavior stood out as a contributor to the advantage: women accepted offers from their partners more often during the exchange, a pattern the authors link to the higher satisfaction and liking their partners reported.
Researchers Conclude Behavior, Not Gender Stereotypes, Drives the Advantage
The authors conclude that women’s advantage in subjective value comes from real differences in negotiating behavior rather than from stereotypes attached to a gender label.
“What convinced us that this effect is real is that it appears even when negotiators do not know the other person’s gender, which suggests the difference is driven by behavior, not perception,”
said Townsend
She added that the finding reframes how negotiation success should be measured:
“Economic outcomes are only half the story. The other half is whether people want to work with you again. That is where women appear to have a meaningful advantage.”
Co-author Solène Delecourt, of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, described the practical stakes of that repeated willingness to negotiate.
“In personal finance, the value of compounding is extremely powerful in the long term,”
Delecourt said
“The same is true in negotiation: if people enjoy the process of negotiating with you, and want to negotiate with you again in the future, that is like a high interest rate. It is likely to lead to more opportunities to negotiate, which can result in long-term gains.”
Limitations: Findings Come from Clear-Cut Negotiation Settings With US-Based Participants
The researchers note that their studies took place in negotiation settings where both parties clearly knew they were there to negotiate, such as structured salary talks or price discussions. They state that it remains an open question whether the same advantage for women would appear in more ambiguous situations, where it may be less obvious that a negotiation is even taking place, such as informal disputes over division of labor at home. Participants in the reported studies also came primarily from the United States through an online recruitment platform, and the transcripts analyzed came from a specific set of negotiation scenarios rather than a broad sample of real-world exchanges. The researchers frame their conclusions about behavior driving the effect as consistent with, rather than definitively proven by, the anonymous and randomly-assigned-label conditions, since actual gender itself cannot be experimentally randomized.
Full Citation
Townsend, C. H., Kray, L. J., & Delecourt, S. (2026). People prefer to negotiate with women, even when outcomes are identical and gender is unknown. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 123(26), e2523202123. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2523202123
