of breast cancer, heart attacks, strokes and blood clots.27
The results of the hormone replacement study alone inspired the
New York Times to call Dr. Healey an “on-the-job hero,” responsible for saving the lives of “tens of thousands of women.” The Times also noted that “many perfectly capable and good men (liberal ones, too) came
before Dr. Healey at the N.I.H.”28 But because none of them were
women, they failed to notice this potentially devastating oversight in
the way we conducted medical research. It wasn’t that these men
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wanted women to die unnecessarily or to receive inappropriate treat-
ment. They just brought different priorities and a different perspective
to the job.
As these two examples demonstrate, allowing women to advance into
positions of greater power and influence has the potential not just to
improve women’s lives but to increase the fund of human knowledge,
change what we know about ourselves as a species—and in some cases
save thousands of lives.
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8
The Female Advantage
Jeremy,28, aformer navalofficer whonowworks asa businessana-
lyst for a software firm, described a situation in which he was travel-
ing abroad and spent an hour negotiating for a rug in a Turkish bazaar
even though he had no interest in buying the rug. He was negotiating
just for the fun of it. Although this story sounds preposterous to many
women (and some men), Jeremy explained that he simply enjoys nego-
tiating—enough to waste an hour negotiating for its own sake. “I like
the gaming,” he said. “It’s a little bit of a game.” David, the hedge fund
manager, described negotiating this way: “When you reach a barrier,
the game is just beginning again. It’s not whether you get knocked
down. It’s whether you get up or not—that’s the real game.” He also said
he loves “the theatrical part of it,” playacting to intimidate or unsettle an
opposing negotiator by hanging up the phone, putting his papers in his
briefcase and leaving the room—even taking a call in the middle of a
negotiation. To him, negotiation is “a sport, absolutely.” And Eli, 56, a
structural engineer, said that he views negotiation as “a big analytic
jigsaw puzzle.”
Whereas men often describe negotiating as a competitive game or a
puzzle, women tend to use different language when they talk about it.
Ingrid, 30, a city councilwoman, said, “It’s not about winning. It’s, ‘How
do I get to my goals and how do I work with this person in this moment
to get to my goals?’ It’s about figuring out very pointedly where I need
to go and how to work with this person to get there. . . . It’s also like
meeting that person where they’re at.”
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Lory, the theater production manager, explains that her preferred
negotiation style is one “in which you make all parties feel included in
the discussion, and they go the most flawlessly when everyone in the
discussion has a sense of ownership of the final outcome. And whether
or not it suits their needs or follows along the lines that they had origi-
nally anticipated or advocated, they still understand how we got there.”
Mercy, the director of space management for a large university, regu-
larly negotiates property purchases and space allocation disputes and
knows why she’s good at it:
I tend to work very closely with whatever group I’m working with,
whether it be my peers or my supervisors or folks, and inform them
and make sure I’ve done a good job of basically lobbying, so that they
sort of come to the conclusion in their own way rather than my going
in and saying, “I want this” or something like that. They see the bene-
fit for all parties and they buy into it rather than me being demanding.
It’s more of an issue of collaborating, getting them to collaborate with
you. . . . I bring people along in the process, and I think I do that
very well.
These different perspectives on negotiation—the male view that it’s
a game or a contest and the female view that it’s a collaborative under-
taking—lead men and women to approach the process of negotiation
very differently.
Up to this point in the book we’ve focused on the socialization that
often prevents women from asking for more of life’s bounty—and on
the discouraging responses they often get when they do negotiate. But
women also have some advantages that can make them outshine men
at negotiating. Although the more aggressive approach favored by many
men can win good short-term results, women’s focus on cooperation
and relationship building can be a huge advantage. This is because a
multitude of negotiation studies in the past two decades have shown
that a cooperative approach, aimed at finding good outcomes for all
parties rather than just trying to “win,” actually produces solutions that
are objectively superior to those produced by more competitive tactics.
The influence of this line of research has been so profound, and the
behaviors it recommends dovetail so nicely with women’s strengths,
that negotiation experts often joke that the goal of many negotiation
courses today is to train people to negotiate like women. This chapter
looks at how powerful the female approach to negotiating can be.
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Cooperative Advantage
Why would taking a cooperative approach to a negotiation produce a
better solution than just trying to get as much as you can for your-
self or “your side?” The answer lies in understanding something negotia-
tion scholars have dubbed “the mythical fixed-pie bias.” Many people
walk into a negotiation mistakenly assuming that their interests are in
direct conflict with those of the other negotiator or negotiators. This
attitude, “the mythical fixed-pie bias,” creates the belief that “what is
good for the other side must be bad for us.”1 Although this is occasion-
ally true, particularly in negotiations in which there’s only one issue to
be decided (“distributive” negotiations), the vast majority of negotia-
tions are not single-issue negotiations. Much more common are multi-
issue negotiations (called “integrative” negotiations), in which more
than one issue needs to be decided or more than one problem needs to
be solved, and the negotiators typically have different priorities. Because
more issues are “in play” in an integrative negotiation, this type of nego-
tiation allows participants to trade things they value less for other things
that matter to them more, a practice called “logrolling.” Perhaps most
important, integrative negotiations allow for resolutions that can be
good for both sides.
To better understand the difference between distributive and inte-
grative negotiations, and between “fixed-pie” and “growing-the-pie” ap-
proaches to negotiation, consider the following example. Suppose two
chefs are prep
aring a dinner together and each one needs a lemon for
one of the dishes he is preparing. Opening the refrigerator, the two men
discover that there is only one lemon left. The two of them might fight
over this lone lemon, with each one arguing that he should get the whole
lemon (that would be each chef’s “position”). This would represent a
“fixed-pie” approach to the situation. But what if one chef really wants
the lemon rind for a cake and the other wants the juice for a marinade
(these would be their “interests”)? If the two chefs describe their interests
to each other, they should be able to work out a solution that not only
benefits both (one man gets the whole rind and the other gets all the
juice) but is better than a straightforward distributive solution (one gets
the whole lemon and the other gets nothing) and better than another
possible solution, such as each cook getting half the lemon.
Surprisingly, very few people who have not been trained in negotia-
tion realize the full benefits of an integrative approach. The negotiation
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professor Leigh Thompson estimates that at least two-thirds of un-
trained negotiators suffer from the “mythical fixed-pie bias.”2 Although
the origin of the bias is unknown, it is reinforced by negotiation books
with titles such as Secrets of Power Negotiating, which offer advice such as: “The more you think of negotiating as a game, the more competitive
you’ll become . . . and the better you’ll do.”3 Encouraged by books like
this, people frequently end up with inferior agreements because they’ve
been so busy competing with each other that they’ve overlooked poten-
tial agreements that would have been better for both parties than the deals they made. The effects of this bias are so extreme that even in
situations in which the parties would actually prefer the same outcome,
they’re often so busy resisting each other’s points of view that they fail
to realize they have the same preference about half the time.4
Since the publication in 1981 of Getting to Yes, which popularized
the view that most negotiations have integrative or “win/win” potential,5
negotiation scholars have explored strategies for finding these superior
solutions. Most of this research has focused on one key factor: increas-
ing the flow of information between the parties and finding out as much
as possible about the other sides’ needs, interests, and preferences.6 This
can be done directly (by asking questions) or indirectly (by asking
whether the other negotiator would be willing to give a little on issue
X in exchange for getting a little on issue Y). It can be done by sharing
information, listening closely, and talking about interests rather than
positions. Although this might seem like an obvious tactic to use, re-
search suggests that most people don’t do this unless they’ve been
trained to do so. In one study, Leigh Thompson found that only 7
percent of untrained negotiators try to discover information about the
other side’s preferences and priorities in a negotiation.7
Integrative tactics (asking questions, listening, sharing information,
and trying to find solutions that satisfy the needs of both sides) differ
dramatically from the competitive tactics (staking out extreme posi-
tions, bluffing, resisting concessions) that can be effective in classic dis-
tributive (one-issue) negotiations. Perhaps most important, integrative
tactics involve behaviors at which women often excel.
Real Differences
We’ve said that women take a more cooperative approach to negotiation
and that men are usually more competitive in their attitude. But do we
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know this for a fact? Although this area of research is relatively new, a
few studies have found that women do indeed behave differently from
men when they negotiate.
In one of the earliest studies to look at this question, the researchers
divided subjects into same-sex pairs to conduct a negotiation that could
be settled in a distributive (i.e., competitive—I win, you lose) fashion
but could also be settled more creatively so that both sides would bene-
fit. They observed that men used distributive tactics (making threats,
insulting the other side, and staking out inflexible positions) much
more than women did.8 In two other studies that compared the charac-
teristics of male and female managers, the business writer and consul-
tant Sally Helgesen found that men were much less likely than women
to share information.9 A meta-analysis that quantified the results of nu-
merous research studies also found differences in the ways in which
men and women behave in negotiations, with women more likely to
behave cooperatively than men.10
Another study, by the negotiation scholars Jennifer Halpern and Judi
McLean Parks, also separated subjects (undergraduates in a negotiations
class) into same-sex groups of two. These all-male or all-female pairs
were asked to conduct a negotiation about allocating public money to
build a children’s playground. One member in each pair played the role
of a representative from the Parks Department and the other played a
representative of a community volunteer organization.11
The differences between the all-male and all-female pairs were dra-
matic. Males were more likely than females to talk about their positions
male pairs discussing their positions but only 17 percent of the female
pairs doing so. Males also used confrontational bargaining techniques
(making threats or posing ultimatums) more, with men using confron-
tational tactics nine times as much as women did. (Only two of the 12
female pairs became confrontational at all.)
On the other side of the equation, the female pairs talked about per-
sonal information far more than the males (92 percent of the females
compared to 23 percent of the males introduced information about
themselves into the negotiation). The women weren’t simply making
small talk, however, or asking random questions about each other’s
private lives. The personal information the women discussed was di-
rectly relevant to what each side wanted, and introducing this informa-
tion into their negotiations helped expand their shared understanding
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of the goals on both sides. In addition, when the women discussed
personal information, they did so within the first five minutes of the
negotiation (suggesting a more efficient process) but the men who intro-
duced personal information did so only after 20 minutes of negotiation,
and only when they were having difficulty reaching an agreement.
Another interesting finding from this study involved the different
ways in which the male and female negotiating teams used the case
information provided to them. Whereas 50 percent of the female pairs
discussed how the playground would affect a senior citizen’s home
nearby (falling in line with women�
�s prescribed role as caretakers who
look out for the interests of others), none of the male pairs took notice
of this factor. On the other hand, 58 percent of the males but only 8
percent of the females discussed legal liability issues. This was particu-
larly noteworthy because legal issues were not part of the case materi-
als—the men introduced them on their own.
The results of the playground study strongly suggest that men typi-
cally focus more on the competitive elements of a negotiation (dis-
cussing their positions from the outset, resorting to confrontational be-
havior, talking about each side’s legal responsibilities) while women
focus more on the relational aspects—the needs of both sides and how
the outcome of the negotiation will affect other people, such as the
senior citizens. Because increasing the flow of information between the
negotiators is essential to achieving a superior solution in an integrative
bargain, and the female pairs exchanged much more information than
the male pairs, this study suggests that women not only employ a more
productive process when they negotiate—they’re more likely to pro-
duce better agreements for both sides.
Our interviews turned up many examples of women quite purpose-
fully taking a collaborative approach to negotiating because they know
that this works better. Cheryl, the toy store owner, said of the negotia-
tion process, “It’s really important to just listen to somebody. Listening
is at the top of the list. That way you get to know that person better.
And then you’ll be able to negotiate better or get what you want out of
it and get what they want out of it.” Lory, the theater production man-
ager, said, “I like getting people to tell me what they think—especially
if they didn’t want to. And especially if it helps us get to where we need
to go, find an answer. . . . I like to hash it out with people, and I like
reaching mutually beneficial goals.” These women’s comments reveal
their understanding that getting a good agreement depends on sharing
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and requesting information. These women understand that the final
agreement in any negotiation shouldn’t merely fulfill their own inter-
ests, it also needs to meet the interests of the other side—a key element