Why people prefer negotiating with women, according to research

Picture two people negotiating entirely through text. No names, no photos, no way to know who's on the other end of the conversation. That's one of five experiments behind a new study on gender and negotiation, and together they're challenging some long-held assumptions about who makes the better deal.

The paper, published in June 2026 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and led by Charlotte Townsend, a postdoctoral associate at Cornell University's ILR School, examined more than 2,000 negotiations across five separate studies. The findings show that people consistently prefer negotiating with women, trust them more, and want to work with them again, even when they have no way of knowing their counterpart's gender at all.

A preference that survives anonymity

The preference for women as negotiating partners challenges an assumption that has shaped negotiation training for years, the idea that a more assertive, traditionally masculine style delivers the best results. Townsend said her team had to weigh two competing possibilities going in.

"We had two potential competing hypotheses," she said. "Women in general tend to be rated more positively compared to men, people like them more, they find them more warm. But we also know there's this predominant narrative of the masculine negotiator archetype, where we expect men to be better negotiators."

To rule out stereotyping, the researchers turned to a dataset of anonymous online negotiations conducted entirely through text chat, with no names, photos, or voices exchanged. A separate group of participants tried to guess the gender of the negotiators from the transcripts alone and did no better than random chance. Yet even in that anonymous setting, women were rated as more trustworthy, fairer, and more likeable than men, with no difference in the financial outcomes of the deal either side walked away with.

The power of strategic acceptance

Digging into the transcripts, the team found one behavior that stood out above the rest, women were more likely to accept offers, and they weren't settling early or taking worse deals to get there.

"It seems like once they'd reach a good deal, that's when they'd accept," Townsend said. "We're calling it strategic acceptance. I definitely wouldn't recommend just accepting an initial offer, but when you've reached a good offer, it's very powerful to be the one to accept it."

The effect held for men and women alike, meaning the behavior itself, not gender, is what built trust. Women simply did it more often. Townsend said she can't yet explain why, though she pointed to related research as a possible clue.

"There's previous work showing men and women are equally concerned with economic outcomes in a negotiation, but women care more about their relationship with the counterpart," she said.

That distinction matters for anyone designing negotiation training, or thinking through how their company handles a salary negotiation. The research isn't a case for teaching people to accommodate more, since over-accommodating can still hurt outcomes. Recognizing the moment a deal is genuinely good, and being willing to close it, can build as much goodwill as the terms themselves.

Rethinking who sits at the table

HR is an industry where women make up the majority of the workforce, and one where salary negotiations, hiring conversations, and internal advocacy happen regularly. That makes this research especially relevant for the people running those conversations.

Townsend said the field has long measured negotiation success too narrowly, and that's exactly what her study set out to correct.

"A lot of what we focus on in negotiations is economic outcomes, which are very important, but not enough on the subjective value," she said. "Women are bringing a lot of strength to the table that's been overlooked."

Subjective value refers to the social and emotional outcomes of a negotiation: how much trust was built, how fair the process felt, and whether both parties would want to work together again. That value carries real financial weight, she added, because people who enjoy negotiating with someone tend to seek them out again. Her team modeled what that pattern looks like over time.

"In the paper, we did a kind of simulation imagining the financial downstream consequences of someone wanting to negotiate with you again," Townsend said. "In an organization, whether you're thinking about salary, hiring, or any other conversation, wanting to work with someone again becomes especially important."

The same logic applies inside a company, where a single negotiation is rarely the last.

"Having a good salary negotiation when someone enters the company opens the door for other positive future negotiation outcomes," she said.

For HR departments already thinking about supporting women leaders in the workplace, the study offers evidence that relational skills long dismissed as soft are driving measurable business outcomes. Companies deciding who leads a high-stakes negotiation, whether it's a union contract, a vendor deal, or an internal compensation discussion, may be overlooking one of their strongest assets by defaulting to old assumptions about who negotiates best.