Shifting directions: from understanding women toward understanding their negotiating counterparts

At their heart, negotiations are social interactions. For too long, research on gender differences has neglected the social context within which negotiations take place by focusing solely on what women do at the negotiating table. Turning attention to the social context both benefits women and opens a new field of inquiry for researchers. Women benefit because they are able to make better sense of their experiences at the negotiating table. Understanding the biases that shape how others respond to women who initiate negotiations empowers women, enhancing feelings of self-efficacy. For researchers, a focus on gender bias shifts attention from interventions to ‘help’ women to interventions that disrupt the impact of gender bias. Importantly, attention moves from the individual to the dyad as a negotiating unit; with whom women negotiate takes center stage as we strive to understand gender bias at the negotiating table. It is also clear that, as gender boundaries grow malleable, researchers need to look beyond the traditional male–female dichotomy in their investigation of how gender influences negotiators’ economic and social outcomes.