People prefer negotiating with women—even when they don’t know it.

Women negotiators earn greater trust, satisfaction, and future opportunities—with no difference in economic outcomes—according to research published today from UC Berkeley Haas and Cornell University ILR School.

People prefer negotiating with women, trust them more, and want to work with them again—even when they have no idea their counterpart is a woman. That’s the central finding of a new study published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that challenges decades of assumptions about gender and negotiation.

The paper, authored by Charlotte Townsend, PhD 24, now a postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University ILR School’s Department of Organizational Behavior, and UC Berkeley Haas management professors Laura Kray and Solène Delecourt, upends decades of conventional wisdom suggesting men are the stronger negotiators.

Across five studies with over 2,000 participants, women achieved equivalent economic outcomes as men and consistently earned higher ratings on what researchers call “subjective value”—meaning their negotiating partners liked them more, felt the process was fairer, and left the table more satisfied. 

“Economic outcomes are only half the story,” said Townsend, the lead author on the paper. “The other half is whether people want to work with you again. That is where women appear to have a meaningful advantage.”

How the research worked

The studies combined archival data, controlled experiments, and analysis of negotiation transcripts. In the first study, researchers analyzed feedback from a full-time MBA negotiation course at Haas, where 231 students completed weekly face-to-face negotiation exercises over ten weeks and rated their partners afterward. Women partners received consistently higher marks on trust, fairness, communication, listening, and overall effectiveness.

To test whether those results were driven by actual behavior, or simply by gender stereotypes, the team analyzed a dataset of anonymous online negotiations where participants haggled over campfire resources via text chat, with no names, photos, or identifying information shared. After negotiations concluded, participants rated how much they liked their partner and how satisfied they were with the outcome.

The key question: could participants tell the gender of the person they were negotiating with? To find out, the researchers ran a separate pretest in which a new group of participants read transcripts of those same chat negotiations and tried to guess the gender of each negotiator. They couldn’t: their accuracy was no better than random chance. Because the negotiations happened entirely through neutral text chat without voice, video, usernames, or personal detail, there was nothing in the conversation to reliably signal whether the person on the other end was a man or a woman. That finding mattered because it meant any preference for women negotiating partners in the anonymous study had to be rooted in actual behavior, not assumptions based on gender.

Even without knowing their partner’s gender, participants liked women negotiators more—and that translated into greater satisfaction with the outcome.

Subsequent experiments used third-party observers who read recreated chat transcripts, sometimes with gender labels randomly assigned. Again, women partners were rated higher on warmth, competence, and liking—and the gender label assigned to a negotiator didn’t change those perceptions, suggesting the advantage came from real behavioral differences, not from expectations tied to gender.

“We wanted to understand who people actually want to sit across from,” Townsend said. “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.”

What’s actually driving the finding

An analysis of negotiation transcripts pointed to one behavior in particular that gave women an advantage: accepting offers. Women were consistently more likely to say yes during negotiations. That behavior, which prior research links to making counterparts feel heard and treated fairly, emerged as the single strongest driver of women’s likability advantage.

This runs counter to earlier research suggesting women’s tendency to accommodate in negotiations hurt them economically. Prior work has warned that when negotiators prioritize relationships over outcomes, economic value can suffer. But that’s not what they found here: Women were accepting offers strategically, generating goodwill without giving ground on outcomes. That suggests in these settings at least, relationships and performance weren’t a tradeoff. 

“For fifty years, negotiation scholars have been so focused on who wins the negotiation that we missed who wins the relationship,” said Kray, the Ned and Carol Spieker Chair in Leadership at Haas. “It turns out, for women, those aren’t competing goals.”

The long-term math

To illustrate how this advantage compounds over time, the researchers ran a “Monte Carlo simulation”—a computational method that runs thousands of randomized scenarios to project likely outcomes, similar to how financial analysts model market risk. Using the study’s observed data on how often partners wanted to negotiate again with women versus men, the simulation projected that women would accumulate roughly 45% more negotiation opportunities over the course of a career.

In dollar terms, using a hypothetical scenario in which each salary negotiation yields a $10,000 bonus, that gap translated to a roughly $55,000 earnings advantage for women over men—purely from the compounding effect of being asked back to the table more often. 

“In personal finance, the value of compounding is extremely powerful in the long-term. 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,” Delecourt said. “It is likely to lead to more opportunities to negotiate, which can result in long-term gains.” 

The researchers noted that the studies were conducted in relatively clear-cut negotiation settings where participants knew they were there to negotiate. While further research is needed to determine whether women’s advantage holds in more ambiguous situations, Townsend said that the results have clear implications for the business world.

“If you’re deciding who to put across the table in a high-stakes negotiation, this research suggests you may be overlooking one of your strongest assets,” said Townsend. “Women are not only negotiating effectively by traditional measures. They are also building the kind of trust that leads people to want to negotiate with them again in the future.”

Key research findings:

• Across five studies (N = 2,401), people consistently reported better subjective outcomes—including greater liking, trust, fairness, and satisfaction—when negotiating with women.
• This preference persisted in fully anonymous online negotiations where gender could not be inferred from behavior (confirmed by a test showing participants could not guess negotiator gender better than chance).
• There were no gender differences in economic outcomes across any study.
• Transcript analysis identified women’s greater tendency to accept offers as the most robust behavioral driver of the “subjective value” gap.
• A Monte Carlo simulation projected women would have approximately 44.56% more negotiation opportunities than men over time.
• The compounding effect of more negotiation opportunities translated to a projected $54,950 earnings advantage for women over men in illustrative scenarios.
• Women were rated higher on both warmth and competence—defying the common stereotype that warmth and competence trade off against each other.

(Prepared with the assistance of AI)

Read the full paper: 

People prefer to negotiate with women, even when outcomes are identical and gender is unknown
By Charlotte H. Townsend, Laura J. Kray, and Solène Delecourt
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 22, 2026