For women negotiating salary, a stubborn statistic has persisted for decades: They earn significantly less than men. In 2017, the average woman took home only about 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man, according to the Pew Research Center. Women are also much less likely than men to be found in top leadership roles in many fields.

What’s the best way to ameliorate these gender disparities in the workplace? Two basic approaches have emerged: (1) the systemic approach, which involves reducing bias and discrimination in organizations’ hiring and promotion practices through systemic change, from anti-bias training to the use of hiring algorithms to new laws; and (2) the “do it yourself” (or DIY) approach, which encourages and trains women to negotiate more assertively for their starting salary, benefits, raises, promotions, and other opportunities.

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Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Many women negotiating salary are understandably tired of waiting for change

Both approaches are undoubtedly essential. Organizational and societal change is required to level the playing field. But while waiting for employers, legislators, and the courts to make broad changes, many women are taking matters into their own hands.

In her influential book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013), former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg called on organizations to reform their hiring practices, but her main message was that women need to “lean in”—that is, to aim higher and take control of their careers. Her book spawned an organization, Lean In, that sponsors local groups in which women can strategize about their careers and learn new skills. Similarly, the organization 81cents provides women with crowdsourced job-offer and compensation reviews. Women submit information about a job offer, and, for a small fee, a group of seven or eight hiring professionals gives her advice on whether it’s fair and, if not, how to negotiate a better offer.

Doin’ it for themselves?

Recently, the DIY message has been criticized for being overly optimistic about women’s ability to overcome systemic challenges on their own. “It’s not always enough to lean in, because that [stuff] doesn’t work all the time,” former first lady Michelle Obama said.

Obama may have been referencing the results of a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Duke University researchers Gráinne Fitzsimons, Aaron Kay, and Jae Yun Kim looked at whether the message that women can address inequities on their own suggests that organizational change isn’t needed—and even that women are to blame for their own underrepresentation.

Across six experiments, about 2,000 participants read text from Sandberg’s book Lean In or listened to audio clips from her TED Talks describing women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles. Some of the participants read or listened to what the researchers call “DIY” messages: those encouraging women to negotiate more assertively, speak more confidently, and take greater risks. Other participants instead read or listened to “structural” passages: those emphasizing structural and societal factors holding back women.

Fitzsimons and her team found that participants exposed to the DIY messages were more likely than those exposed to the structural messages to believe that women are capable of solving the problem of bias. Yet those in the DIY condition also were more likely to believe that women are responsible for both causing the problem and for fixing it.

A two-pronged approach

The study’s results seem to suggest that messages that focus on steps women might take to try to get ahead in their careers, such as improving their negotiation skills, may lead people to conclude that women play a greater role in perpetuating and perhaps even contributing to gender inequality than is actually the case. Fitzsimons and her colleagues note that it’s human nature to blame the victims of discrimination and bias. When we can’t easily address injustice, we often “engage in mental gymnastics to make the injustice more palatable,” they write in the Harvard Business Review.

Negotiation advice and training remain essential components of initiatives aimed at boosting the representation of women in leadership roles and reducing the gender pay gap for women negotiating salary. But efforts to address inequity and gender bias at the organizational and societal level appear to be even more necessary, for at least two reasons.

First, though they can take a while to enact, policies and laws can have a much larger collective impact on society than the actions of individual women working one by one on their own behalf. Second, structural changes may be less likely to inspire apathy, victim blaming, and the sense that women can and should be tackling inequity on their own.

When working on improving their hiring and promotion practices, organizations need to elicit messages and implement remedies focused on structure, lest efforts aimed at bolstering women’s skills and confidence backfire by implying that women are somehow to blame.

What has worked for you in successful salary negotiations in which the gender pay gap was an issue?

Melvin Shakun is a management consultant, professor emeritus at New York University, and founding editor of the international journal Group Decision and Negotiation. He spoke with Negotiation Briefings about dealing with conflict, and how negotiators can break through impasse by appealing to common values.

Dealing with conflict: How shared values can bring us together

Negotiation Briefings: How do you define values in the context of negotiation?

Melvin Shakun: Values are purposes we desire and would like to realize in negotiation. It might be to make money or to reduce the burning of fossil fuels to limit climate change. Concrete decisions and goals, such as making money, can be found at the bottom of the values hierarchy. By contrast, higher-level values are those that relate more to our broader goals and common humanity.

NB: What’s one important higher- level value?

MS: What I refer to as “connectedness with the other” is a very important higher-order value that often propels progress on lower-level values. I once met the mayor of a small town in a wine-producing region in the south of France who had to manage conflict within the town council. He said that when they were dealing with conflict, he would bring out several bottles of his wine. They would taste the wine and give their opinions, and the council members who had vineyards would bring in their own wine to be tasted. When they got back down to business, everyone would feel more connected, and more open to compromise and solutions as a result. You can create connectedness with the other in many ways, such as sharing a meal or talking about common interests or experiences.

Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills

Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

NB: What if you try to appeal to a higher-level value and the other side doesn’t respond?

MS: When you’re dealing with conflict, there’s always some other higher-level value. At one time, I lived in a large faculty-housing building in New York City. The children’s swings were in an open area where residents’ dogs could roam, and the area wasn’t very clean as a result. So the faculty met to vote on whether to keep dogs out of the area. My wife and I had a dog, but we recognized that children need a safe and clean space to play. We proposed keeping the area clean and our dogs on leashes, but it looked like we were going to lose.

Just before the vote, a faculty member raised his hand and said, “I’m against the dog run, but I care about minority rights, and the faculty with dogs are in the minority.” Aha! I proposed that they give us three months to keep the area clean and safe, and then hold the vote. So, that’s what they did. The dog owners followed the new rules, and the kids had a nice place to play.

The decision was changed by introducing the concept of minority rights—a higher-level value than the more obvious, practical values we were discussing, such as kids’ rights to a clean play area and space for dogs to get exercise. These were the concrete goals, and there was a conflict at that level. But a faculty member saw dog owners as human beings. Consequently, “connectedness with the other” acted as a higher-level value that promoted agreement at a lower level.

NB: What other higher-level values can negotiators draw on to break through impasse?

MS: New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has identified six “moral foundation values”: liberty, fairness, care, loyalty, sanctity, and authority. Essentially, they’re innate evolutionary intuitions that are culturally modified. For example, we all have an instinct to take care of those who need help, but the strength of that instinct varies among cultures. Often, Haidt points out, political polarization between liberals and conservatives is based on the different emphases they give these moral foundations. Liberals primarily value care, liberty, and fairness, so they focus on social programs. Conservatives’ most sacred value is to preserve institutions and traditions that sustain all six values.

NB: Given these differences, how can we come together?

MS: One fairly high-level value that’s not used enough in Washington now is what I call a “right/wrong value.” It’s a value where you say, “I am right, but you are not wrong.” If you say that to someone, it means, “I am willing to listen to you,” and that can go a long way toward building connectedness. It’s the truth, by the way, because no one knows for sure which side is right and which is wrong because right and wrong depend on how you see the problem.

I’d like for someone in Congress to stand up and say, “I am right, but you are not wrong.” It doesn’t mean you’ll vote the other way; it means you are listening. And hopefully, your counterpart will say that back to you.

By introducing new values, and encouraging all negotiators to explore the higher-level values that are important to them, you can change people and change the negotiation. We’re all human. Chances are, if we can identify the right values, more people will identify with them. That can help restructure a negotiation and lead to a solution.

What techniques have helped you in dealing with conflict?

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly asserted that if he were elected, eliminating the U.S. trade deficit with China would be a top priority. But once in office, Trump was alternately swayed by opposing factions in his administration: pro-business moderates and America-first trade hawks. The resulting roller-coaster ride, as summarized in the Wall Street Journal, serves as a reminder that building a winning team in negotiation requires effective team leadership skills.

A Changing of the Guard

At Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in April 2017, he and China’s president, Xi Jinping, agreed on a 100-day plan to reduce economic tensions. In negotiations between Wang Yang, one of China’s four vice premiers, and U.S. commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, China promised to try to reduce its steel production to allow American steel to rebound. But when Ross presented the draft deal to Trump, he said it hadn’t gone far enough and called off the negotiation, according to the Journal.

For a new round of trade talks in Beijing, Trump replaced Ross with U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, more of a hard-liner on trade. Lighthizer persuaded Trump to reject a new concession from China—greater access to the nation’s financial sectors for foreign firms—as too little, too late. “They’re playing you,” Lighthizer told the president, sources told the Journal.

Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills

Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Carrots and Sticks

After Trump began threatening to levy major tariffs on China, U.S. treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin set up trade talks in Beijing for May 2018, despite objections from Lighthizer. Trump appointed Mnuchin to head the delegation with Lighthizer on the team.

The budding rivalry, evidently part of Trump’s strategy for building a winning team, was rooted in differing views on the trade imbalance with China. Lighthizer reportedly viewed tariffs as a useful stick for punishing China for its past trade policy and motivating change. Mnuchin preferred to use negotiation as a carrot to spur concessions. At different times, both approaches—escalation and diplomacy—appealed to Trump, but Lighthizer’s views repeatedly won out, the Journal reports.

Conflict in the Ranks

On the first day of the Beijing talks, Lighthizer presented tough new U.S. demands, including calling on China to reduce its $375 billion trade surplus with the United States by $200 billion within two years, according to the Journal. The next day, in earshot of Chinese officials, White House adviser Peter Navarro, another U.S. hard-liner on trade, angrily accused Mnuchin of attempting a power grab by setting up a private negotiating session with Chinese vice premier Liu He.

In subsequent meetings, when the Chinese asked Lighthizer for his input, he reportedly often replied, “I have nothing to say.” Both Chinese and American representatives concluded he had been sent to the talks to police Mnuchin.

The Return of Tariff Man

After the White House announced a new round of tariffs on Chinese imports, China canceled a negotiation between Liu and Mnuchin in Washington, D.C. The Chinese government hoped Trump would back down on tariffs if the Republicans fared poorly in the 2018 midterm elections, but when his party held on to the Senate, the president declared victory.

In the lead-up to G20 meetings in Argentina in late 2018, Trump “veered from optimism to wariness about a deal, sometimes in the course of a single statement,” according to the New York Times. Mnuchin continued to promote compromise, while hawks such as Navarro urged Trump to double down on tariffs, the Times reports. Moderates tried unsuccessfully to keep Navarro from taking the trip.

Over dinner with their teams in Buenos Aires on December 1, Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping reached a deal to freeze tariffs and agreed to another round of talks to resolve their differences. That night, the business moderates won. Three days later, Trump tweeted: “President Xi and I want this deal to happen, and it probably will. But if not remember … I am a Tariff Man.” Stocks plunged in response.

Trump continued to escalate his trade war with China through 2019. In January 2020, the two nations reached a limited “phase one” trade agreement, but China failed to meet its commitments, and tensions continued through the remainder of Trump’s presidency.

Building a Winning Team

These team-building strategies, derived from missteps in the U.S.-China trade dispute, can be applied to building a winning team for any intricate negotiation or conflict-resolution effort:

• Seek diverse opinions, then draw your own conclusions. When setting a strategy for an important negotiation or conflict-resolution effort, it can be valuable to seek a variety of viewpoints. But effective leadership and teamwork require us to craft a unified approach. Although both carrots and sticks can be effective, veering repeatedly between cooperation and punishment stands in the way of trust-building and progress.

• Promote team cohesion. If the other team detects chaos and conflict within your ranks or a poorly disguised good-cop, bad-cop tactic, they are liable to take advantage. Successful team-building strategies include spending ample time preparing to negotiate. Negotiate key roles, discuss substance, and confront any differences that emerge. When disagreements arise during talks, work them through privately.

• Size up the other side. Don’t take the other team’s apparent chain of command at face value. Size up and research individual negotiators’ areas of expertise, perspectives, and influence in their organization. For effective leadership, rather than treating surprising behavior as an anomaly, continually update your assessments. Strive to make inroads with those who appear to have the most sway with top leaders.

What strategies have you found effective in building a winning team?

Claim your FREE copy: Negotiation Skills

Build powerful negotiation skills and become a better dealmaker and leader. Download our FREE special report, Negotiation Skills: Negotiation Strategies and Negotiation Techniques to Help You Become a Better Negotiator, from the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

Melvin Shakun is a management consultant, professor emeritus at New York University, and founding editor of the international journal Group Decision and Negotiation. He spoke with Negotiation Briefings about how negotiators can break through impasse and resolve conflict by appealing to common values.

Negotiation Briefings: How do you define values in the context of negotiation?

Melvin Shakun: Values are purposes we desire and would like to realize in negotiation. It might be to make money or to reduce the burning of fossil fuels to limit climate change. Concrete decisions and goals, such as making money, can be found at the bottom of the values hierarchy. By contrast, higher-level values are those that relate more to our broader goals and common humanity.

NB: What’s one important higher- level value?

MS: What I refer to as “connectedness with the other” is a very important higher-order value that often propels progress on lower-level values. I once met the mayor of a small town in a wine- producing region in the south of France who had to manage conflict within the town council. He said that when they were facing a really tough conflict, he would bring out several bottles of his wine. They would taste the wine and give their opinions, and the council members who had vineyards would bring in their own wine to be tasted. When they got back down to business, everyone would feel more connected, and more open to compromise and solutions as a result. You can create connectedness with the other in many ways, such as sharing a meal or talking about common interests or experiences.

NB: What if you try to appeal to a higher-level value and the other side doesn’t respond?

MS: There’s always some other higher-level value. At one time, I lived in a large faculty-housing building in New York City. The children’s swings were in an open area where residents’ dogs could roam, and the area wasn’t very clean as a result. So the faculty met to vote on whether to keep dogs out of the area. My wife and I had a dog, but we recognized that children need a safe and clean space to play. We proposed keeping the area clean and our dogs on leashes, but it looked like we were going to lose.

Just before the vote, a faculty member raised his hand and said, “I’m against the dog run, but I care about minority rights, and the faculty with dogs are in the minority.” Aha! I proposed that they give us three months to keep the area clean and safe, and then hold the vote. So, that’s what they did. The dog owners followed the new rules, and the kids had a nice place to play.

The decision was changed by introducing the concept of minority rights—a higher-level value than the more obvious, practical values we were discussing, such as kids’ rights to a clean play area and space for dogs to get exercise. These were the concrete goals, and there was a conflict at that level. But a faculty member saw dog owners as human beings. Consequently, “connectedness with the other” acted as a higher-level value that promoted agreement at a lower level.

NB: What other higher-level values can negotiators draw on to break through impasse?

MS: New York University professor Jonathan Haidt has identified six “moral foundation values”: liberty, fairness, care, loyalty, sanctity, and authority. Essentially, they’re innate evolutionary intuitions that are culturally modified. For example, we all have an instinct to take care of those who need help, but the strength of that instinct varies among cultures. Often, Haidt points out, political polarization between liberals and conservatives is based on the different emphases they give these moral foundations. Liberals primarily value care, liberty, and fairness, so they focus on social programs. Conservatives’ most sacred value is to preserve institutions and traditions that sustain all six values.

NB: Given these differences, how can we come together?

MS: One fairly high-level value that’s not used enough in Washington now is what I call a “right/wrong value.” It’s a value where you say, “I am right, but you are not wrong.” If you say that to someone, it means, “I am willing to listen to you,” and that can go a long way toward building connectedness. It’s the truth, by the way, because no one knows for sure which side is right and which is wrong because right and wrong depend on how you see the problem.

I’d like for someone in Congress to stand up and say, “I am right, but you are not wrong.” It doesn’t mean you’ll vote the other way; it means you are listening. And hopefully, your counterpart will say that back to you.

By introducing new values, and encouraging all negotiators to explore the higher-level values that are important to them, you can change people and change the negotiation. We’re all human. Chances are, if we can identify the right values, more people will identify with them. That can help restructure a negotiation and lead to a solution.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly asserted that if he were elected, eliminating the U.S. trade deficit with China would be a top priority. “We can’t continue to allow China to rape our country, and that’s what they’re doing,” he said at a campaign rally in 2015. “It’s the greatest theft in the history of the world.”

After Trump won the election, the Chinese government took his measure and concluded that his anti-China rhetoric on the campaign trail had been mere showmanship. Trump was a pragmatic, transactional businessman, they calculated, someone with whom they could negotiate. “His family-run business empire looked familiar in a region where family conglomerates were common,” the Wall Street Journal writes. And former U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger, who advised president-elect Trump on China, assured Chinese officials that the new president was willing to put “everything” on the negotiating table.

That assessment turned out to be far too simplistic and optimistic, China learned over the next two years. With Trump apparently torn between his instincts as a businessman and a politician, he’s been alternately swayed by opposing factions in his administration: pro-business moderates and America-first trade hawks. The resulting roller-coaster ride, summarized in a recent article in the Journal, attests to the value of striving for team cohesion even as we solicit opposing views.

With Trump apparently torn between his instincts as a businessman and apolitician, he’s been alternately swayed by opposing factions in his administration: pro-business moderates and America-first trade hawks.

A changing of the guard

At the new president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida in April 2017, Trump and China’s president, Xi Jinping, agreed on a 100-day plan to reduce economic tensions between their countries. In the negotiations that followed between Wang Yang, one of China’s four vice premiers, and U.S. commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, China promised to work harder to reduce its steel production to allow American steel to rebound. But when Ross presented the draft deal at the White House, Trump said it hadn’t gone far enough and called off the negotiation, according to the Journal.

For a new round of trade talks scheduled for November 2017 in Beijing, Trump replaced Ross with a new lead negotiator, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, more of a hard-liner on trade. Lighthizer persuaded Trump to reject a new concession from China—greater access to the nation’s financial sectors for foreign firms—as too little, too late. “They’re playing you,” Lighthizer told the president, sources told the Journal.

Carrots and sticks

After Trump began threatening to levy major tariffs on China, U.S. treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin set up a new round of trade talks in Beijing for May 2018, despite objections from Lighthizer. Trump appointed Mnuchin to head the delegation but put Lighthizer on the team.

The budding rivalry between Mnuchin and Lighthizer was rooted in their differing views on how to lessen the trade imbalance with China. Lighthizer reportedly viewed tariffs as a useful stick for punishing China for its past trade policy and motivating change. Former Goldman Sachs Group executive Mnuchin, meanwhile, preferred to use negotiation as a carrot to spur concessions. At different times, both approaches—escalation and diplomacy— appealed to Trump. Over the next year and a half, however, it was Lighthizer’s views that repeatedly won out, even as Chinese officials continued trying to reach Trump through Mnuchin, the Journal reports.

Conflict in the ranks

On the first day of the Beijing talks, Lighthizer presented tough new U.S. demands, including calling on China to reduce its $375 billion trade surplus with the United States by $200 billion within two years, according to the Journal. The next day, in earshot of Chinese officials, White House adviser Peter Navarro, another U.S. hard-liner on trade, angrily accused Mnuchin of attempting a power grab by setting up a private negotiating session with Chinese vice premier Liu He.

In subsequent meetings, when the Chinese asked Lighthizer for his input, he reportedly often replied, “I have nothing to say.” Both Chinese and American representatives concluded he had been sent to the talks to police Mnuchin.

The return of Tariff Man

After the White House announced a new round of tariffs on Chinese imports, China canceled a planned negotiation between Liu and Mnuchin in Washington, D.C. The Chinese government hoped Trump would back down on tariffs if the Republicans fared poorly in the midterm elections, but when his party held on to the Senate, the president declared victory.

In the lead-up to G20 meetings in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in late 2018, Trump “veered from optimism to wariness about a deal, sometimes in the course of a single statement,” according to the New York Times. Mnuchin continued to promote compromise, while hawks such as Navarro urged Trump to “double down” on tariffs, the Timesreports. Moderates tried unsuccessfully to keep Navarro from taking the trip.

Over a steak dinner with their teams in Buenos Aires on December 1, Trump and Chinese president Xi Jinping reached a deal to freeze tariffs and agreed to another round of talks to resolve their differences. That night, the business moderates won. Three days later, Trump tweeted: “President Xi and I want this deal to happen, and it probably will. But if not remember, I am a Tariff Man.” Stocks plunged in response.

Leading complex negotiations

These lessons from the U.S.-China trade dispute can be applied to any intricate negotiation or conflict-resolution effort:

• Seek diverse opinions—and then draw your own conclusions. When setting strategy for an important negotiation or conflict-resolution effort, it can be valuable to seek a variety of viewpoints. At a certain point, however, you’ll need to sift through the facts and opinions, and craft a unified approach. Although both carrots and sticks can be effective, veering repeatedly between cooperation and punishment stands in the way of trust building and progress.
• Promote team cohesion. If the other team detects chaos and conflict within your ranks, or a poorly disguised good cop/bad cop tactic, they are liable to take advantage. To get your team on the same page, spend ample time preparing to negotiate. Negotiate key roles, discuss substance, and confront any rivalries or differences of opinion that emerge head-on. When disagreements arise during talks, work them through privately.
• Size up the other side. Don’t take the other team’s apparent chain of command at face value. A team’s spokesperson may not be the one who has the CEO’s ear back at the office, for example. Size up and research individual negotiators’ areas of expertise, perspectives, and influence in their organization. Rather than treating surprising behavior as an anomaly, continually update your assessments. Strive to make inroads with those who appear to have the most sway with top leaders.

For decades, as women have filled the workforce and entered careers once closed to them, a stubborn statistic has persisted: They earn significantly less than men. In 2017, the average woman took home only about 82 cents for every dollar earned by a man, according to the Pew Research Center. Women are also much less likely than men to be found in top leadership roles in many fields.

What’s the best way to ameliorate these gender disparities in the workplace? Two basic approaches have emerged: (1) the systemic approach, which involves reducing bias and discrimination in organizations’ hiring and promotion practices through systemic change, from anti-bias training to the use of hiring algorithms to new laws; and (2) the “do it yourself” (or DIY) approach, which encourages and trains women to negotiate more assertively for their starting salary, benefits, raises, promotions, and other opportunities.

Both approaches are undoubtedly essential. Organizational and societal change is required to level the playing field. But while waiting for employers, legislators, and the courts to make broad changes, many women are taking matters into their own hands.

In her influential book Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (Knopf, 2013), Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg called on organizations to reform their hiring practices, but her main message was that women need to “lean in”—that is, to aim higher and take control of their careers. Her book spawned an organization, Lean In, that sponsors local groups in which women can strategize about their careers and learn new skills. Similarly, the new startup 81cents provides women with crowdsourced job-offer and compensation reviews. Women submit information about a job offer, and, for a small fee, a group of seven or eight hiring professionals gives her advice on whether it’s fair and, if not, how to negotiate a better offer.

Doin’ it for themselves?

Recently, the DIY message has been criticized for being overly optimistic about women’s ability to overcome systemic challenges on their own. “It’s not always enough to lean in, because that [stuff] doesn’t work all the time,” former first lady Michelle Obama recently said at an event in Brooklyn, New York.

Obama may have been referencing the results of a recent study that’s forthcoming in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Duke University researchers Gráinne Fitzsimons, Aaron Kay, and Jae Yun Kim looked at whether the message that women can address inequities on their own suggests that organizational change isn’t needed—and even that women are to blame for their own underrepresentation.

Across six experiments, about 2,000 participants read text from Sandberg’s book Lean In or listened to audio clips from her TED Talks describing women’s underrepresentation in leadership roles. Some of the participants read or listened to what the researchers call “DIY” messages: those encouraging women to negotiate more assertively, speak more confidently, and take greater risks. Other participants instead read or listened to “structural” passages: those emphasizing structural and societal factors holding back women.

Organizational and societal change is required to level the playing field. But while waiting for employers, legislators, and the courts to make broad changes, many women are taking matters into their own hands.

Fitzsimons and her team found that participants exposed to the DIY messages were more likely than those exposed to the structural messages to believe that women are capable of solving the problem of bias. Yet those in the DIY condition also were more likely to believe that women are responsible for both causing the problem and for fixing it.

A two-pronged approach

The study’s results seem to suggest that messages that focus on steps women might take to try to get ahead in their careers, such as improving their negotiation skills, may lead people to conclude that women play a greater role in perpetuating and perhaps even contributing to gender inequality than is actually the case. Fitzsimons and her colleagues note that it’s human nature to blame the victims of discrimination and bias. When we can’t easily address injustice, we often “engage in mental gymnastics to make the injustice more palatable,” they write in the Harvard Business Review.

Negotiation advice and training remain essential components of initiatives aimed at boosting the representation of women in leadership roles and reducing the gender pay gap. But efforts to address inequity and gender bias at the organizational and societal level appear to be even more necessary, for at least two reasons.

First, though they can take a while to enact, policies and laws can have a much larger collective impact on society than the actions of individual women working one by one on their own behalf. Second, structural changes may be less likely to inspire apathy, victim blaming, and the sense that women can and should be tackling inequity on their own.

When working on improving their hiring and promotion practices, organizations need to elicit messages and implement remedies focused on structure, lest efforts aimed at bolstering women’s skills and confidence backfire by implying that women are somehow to blame.

Those who participate regularly in auctions have likely observed the phenomenon of “auction fever” firsthand—or caught the fever themselves. Defined by London Business School professor Gillian Ku and her colleagues as “the emotionally charged and frantic behavior of auction participants that can result in overbidding,” auction fever has been observed in competitive bidding realms ranging from eBay auctions to government and manufacturing procurement contracts to fine-art auctions. This emotionally driven behavior often doesn’t make much sense: In a 2011 study by Ohio State University researcher Matthew Jones, for example, 41% of people bidding on eBay for Amazon.com gift cards paid more than the cards’ face value.

What causes auction fever? Research on “competitive arousal” has found that prevalent features of auctions, including rivalry, time pressure, and the presence of an audience, fuel arousal—a physiological and emotional state of attentive alertness marked by a rapid heartbeat, sweating, and other symptoms. Arousal in turn motivates a desire to win, sometimes even if this means incurring a financial loss.

In a new study, University of Newcastle researcher Marc T.P. Adam examined whether arousal unrelated to the auction itself could also be a driver of auction fever. In one experiment, participants were fitted with electrodes to monitor their heart rate. Participants in the high-arousal condition then engaged in a timed symbol-matching task on the computer in competition with others. By contrast, participants in the low-arousal condition listened to soothing “spa” music while completing a much easier matching task with little time pressure.

Next, all the participants engaged in two auctions with two other bidders each for jars of coins of unknown value; winners were paid the true value of the jar minus the amount they bid. The results showed that the high-arousal participants were significantly more likely to overbid for the jars than the low-arousal participants. These results were replicated in other experiments with other arousal inductions, such as viewing innocuous images (stationery, pebbles, Q-tips, etc.) in the low-arousal condition and emotionally charged images (fire, a shark, a kissing couple, etc.) in the high-arousal condition. Interestingly, the results of one of the experiments revealed that participants were unaware of the impact of “incidental arousal”— that is, arousal not triggered by the auction itself—on their bidding.

When preparing to partake in auctions, keep in mind that emotional arousal, whether incited by the competition itself or by irrelevant factors (such as an argument with a relative or the stress of running late), could lead you to overbid. You should be able to avoid becoming the next victim of auction fever by determining your maximum bid in advance and avoiding stressors and other triggers that could elevate your heart rate before and during the auction.

Resource: “Auction Fever: The Unrecognized Effects of Incidental Arousal,” by Marc T.P. Adam, Gillian Ku, and Ewa Lux. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018.

Those who participate regularly in auctions have likely observed the phenomenon of “auction fever” firsthand—or caught the fever themselves. Defined by London Business School professor Gillian Ku and her colleagues as “the emotionally charged and frantic behavior of auction participants that can result in overbidding,” auction fever has been observed in competitive bidding realms ranging from eBay auctions to government and manufacturing procurement contracts to fine-art auctions. This emotionally driven behavior often doesn’t make much sense: In a 2011 study by Ohio State University researcher Matthew Jones, for example, 41% of people bidding on eBay for Amazon.com gift cards paid more than the cards’ face value.

What causes auction fever? Research on “competitive arousal” has found that prevalent features of auctions, including rivalry, time pressure, and the presence of an audience, fuel arousal—a physiological and emotional state of attentive alertness marked by a rapid heartbeat, sweating, and other symptoms. Arousal in turn motivates a desire to win, sometimes even if this means incurring a financial loss.

In a new study, University of Newcastle researcher Marc T.P. Adam examined whether arousal unrelated to the auction itself could also be a driver of auction fever. In one experiment, participants were fitted with electrodes to monitor their heart rate. Participants in the high-arousal condition then engaged in a timed symbol-matching task on the computer in competition with others. By contrast, participants in the low-arousal condition listened to soothing “spa” music while completing a much easier matching task with little time pressure.

Next, all the participants engaged in two auctions with two other bidders each for jars of coins of unknown value; winners were paid the true value of the jar minus the amount they bid. The results showed that the high-arousal participants were significantly more likely to overbid for the jars than the low-arousal participants. These results were replicated in other experiments with other arousal inductions, such as viewing innocuous images (stationery, pebbles, Q-tips, etc.) in the low-arousal condition and emotionally charged images (fire, a shark, a kissing couple, etc.) in the high-arousal condition. Interestingly, the results of one of the experiments revealed that participants were unaware of the impact of “incidental arousal”— that is, arousal not triggered by the auction itself—on their bidding.

When preparing to partake in auctions, keep in mind that emotional arousal, whether incited by the competition itself or by irrelevant factors (such as an argument with a relative or the stress of running late), could lead you to overbid. You should be able to avoid becoming the next victim of auction fever by determining your maximum bid in advance and avoiding stressors and other triggers that could elevate your heart rate before and during the auction.

Resource: “Auction Fever: The Unrecognized Effects of Incidental Arousal,” by Marc T.P. Adam, Gillian Ku, and Ewa Lux. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2018.

Wise negotiators put a lot of time and effort into making sure they’re ready to do business. They set ambitious goals, research their bottom line, explore their alternatives, and find out as much as they can about their counterpart. They may give less consideration, however, to the words they’ll use to persuade, question, debate, and brainstorm at the table.

Given the improvisatory nature of negotiations—we never quite know what our counterpart will say next—it may seem pointless to think about word choice. Yet recent research and news stories stress that we can enhance our odds of getting a great deal by adhering to a few simple linguistic guidelines.

Try a “gain frame”

Imagine you have decided to sell your car. After doing some research, you decide to ask for $5,000 with the
goal of accepting no less than $4,500. When meeting with a prospective buyer, which of the following offers do you think you should make?„

• “I’m asking $5,000 for the car.”
• “I can give you the car for $5,000.”

The monetary offer is the same in both sentences, but the offers are framed differently: Option A highlights the resource you’re requesting (money), while Option B highlights the resource you’re offering (the car). Expressed differently, Option A focuses on taking something from the buyer, and Option B focuses on giving something to the buyer.

The difference may seem subtle, but it’s a difference that matters, Leuphana University professor Roman Trötschel and his colleagues found in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across numerous experiments, the researchers paired up participants to engage in a negotiation. Whether playing the role of buyer or seller, when a participant offered a resource, his or her counterpart made greater concessions than when the participant asked for a resource—even though the offers were objectively identical.

The effect was even found among children exchanging trading cards: When fourth graders offered to give something (for example, “I’ll give you four of my cards for five of your cards”), their partners made greater concessions than when the children asked to take something (e.g., “I’ll take five of your cards for four of my cards”).

Due to irrational “loss aversion,” or the common human tendency to prefer to avoid a loss over acquiring an equivalent gain, framing an offer in terms of what your counterpart would gain is likely to get you a better deal than framing the offer in terms of what he has to lose.

Avoid “taboo” words

When the delegates from the Group of 20—the world’s 20 largest economies, or G20—met in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this past December to negotiate reforms to the global trading system, the words they didn’t use turned out to be just as important as the ones they did.

With the United States and China embroiled in an escalating trade dispute, delegates were warned to stay away from certain sensitive terms, the New York Times reports. Protectionism, for example, was off-limits because it had been used to criticize U.S. president Donald Trump for the tariffs he imposed on Chinese goods and on other G20 nations’ steel and aluminum imports. China, meanwhile, which has been accused of violating the intellectual property rights of other G20 nations, among other accusations, objected to references to fair trade practices, according to delegates.

“A number of words that we used to have always in G7 and G20 summit communiques became kind of taboos,” a European official told the Times. “We have American taboos and Chinese taboos.” In part by avoiding these taboo words, delegates were able to negotiate a communique that pledged to reform the World Trade Organization, a widely shared goal.

It’s not unusual for negotiators to bristle at hot-button terms, especially ones they view as critical of their views and behavior. Try to identify such taboo words, and avoid them when possible, even as you negotiate the substance behind them—for example, negotiating intellectual property rights without referencing the umbrella of fair trade practices.

Negotiate disadvantageous terms

What should you do when a counterpart uses a word or term that seems unworkable to you? Take the case of the recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) renegotiations among Canada, Mexico, and the United States. In October 2017, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer made a controversial proposal requiring that half the content of cars built in North America come from the United States. Canada and Mexico considered the proposal to be incompatible with NAFTA’s goal of integrating the continent.

When the delegates from the Group of 20—the world’s 20 largest economies, or G20—met in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this past Decemberto negotiate reforms to the global trading system, the words they didn’t use turned out to be just as important as the ones they did.

What to do? A Canadian trade bureaucrat charged with troubleshooting the issue proposed changing the criteria for what counts as “North American content” to emphasize high-value input, such as software, according to the Wall Street Journal. The change would boost production in either the United States or Canada, where software development is more common than it is in Mexico. The revised criteria appeared to meet the spirit of Lighthizer’s proposal without explicitly giving the United States an advantage.

Two months after the Canadian team pitched the idea, the American team presented a counterproposal that would require a certain percentage of cars produced in North America to be made with high-wage labor, which would exclude Mexico unless wages rose there. Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, viewed the offer as an opportunity to boost the wages of Mexican autoworkers and got behind the plan. The United States and Mexico reached agreement on that and other issues in August, and Canada signed on in September.

The lesson: If you don’t like the way a counterpart is defining a term, see if you can redefine it rather than reject it outright.

Beware linguistic mimicry

When conversational partners mimic each other’s body language, it can be a sign that they’re deeply engaged in the exchange. We might assume, therefore, that the more closely negotiating partners’ linguistic styles match up, the better their bargaining outcomes will be. However, research by Texas Tech University professor Molly Ireland and University of Texas professor Marlone Henderson published in the journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research and discussed in Discover magazine tells a more complex story.

Ireland and Henderson analyzed transcripts of typed instant messages between study participants playing
the role of coworkers negotiating travel plans for a business trip. Specifically, they looked at the participants’ use of seemingly innocuous parts of speech that have been found to be the most revealing of people’s underlying psychology: personal pronouns (such as I or we), impersonal pronouns (it and that), articles (a, an, or the), and contractions (don’t versus do not). Contrary to intuition, the researchers found that the more participants’ linguistic styles synced up, the less likely they were to reach agreement.

Why? The answer came when Ireland analyzed the degree to which the participants used travel words, such as car, hotel, and train—that is, words related to the negotiation task. Interestingly, the more they used such words, the less their linguistic styles matched. It seems that the time they spent tuning in to each other’s thoughts and emotions distracted them from the task at hand.

In other research, Ireland found that speed daters were more likely to pair up—and dating couples were more likely to be together after several months—when their linguistic styles closely matched. Therefore, in relationship-oriented interactions and negotiations, linguistic mimicry can be an asset. But in business contexts, such matching can be an indication of lack of focus.

Linguistic matching can be very difficult to detect because it relies on unobtrusive parts of speech. But if you do notice that you and your counterpart are using the same verbal tics, it could be a sign you need to get back on track.

Wise negotiators put a lot of time and effort into making sure they’re ready to do business. They set ambitious goals, research their bottom line, explore their alternatives, and find out as much as they can about their counterpart. They may give less consideration, however, to the words they’ll use to persuade, question, debate, and brainstorm at the table.

Given the improvisatory nature of negotiations—we never quite know what our counterpart will say next—it may seem pointless to think about word choice. Yet recent research and news stories stress that we can enhance our odds of getting a great deal by adhering to a few simple linguistic guidelines.

Try a “gain frame”

Imagine you have decided to sell your car. After doing some research, you decide to ask for $5,000 with the
goal of accepting no less than $4,500. When meeting with a prospective buyer, which of the following offers do you think you should make?„

• “I’m asking $5,000 for the car.”
• “I can give you the car for $5,000.”

The monetary offer is the same in both sentences, but the offers are framed differently: Option A highlights the resource you’re requesting (money), while Option B highlights the resource you’re offering (the car). Expressed differently, Option A focuses on taking something from the buyer, and Option B focuses on giving something to the buyer.

The difference may seem subtle, but it’s a difference that matters, Leuphana University professor Roman Trötschel and his colleagues found in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Across numerous experiments, the researchers paired up participants to engage in a negotiation. Whether playing the role of buyer or seller, when a participant offered a resource, his or her counterpart made greater concessions than when the participant asked for a resource—even though the offers were objectively identical.

The effect was even found among children exchanging trading cards: When fourth graders offered to give something (for example, “I’ll give you four of my cards for five of your cards”), their partners made greater concessions than when the children asked to take something (e.g., “I’ll take five of your cards for four of my cards”).

Due to irrational “loss aversion,” or the common human tendency to prefer to avoid a loss over acquiring an equivalent gain, framing an offer in terms of what your counterpart would gain is likely to get you a better deal than framing the offer in terms of what he has to lose.

Avoid “taboo” words

When the delegates from the Group of 20—the world’s 20 largest economies, or G20—met in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this past December to negotiate reforms to the global trading system, the words they didn’t use turned out to be just as important as the ones they did.

With the United States and China embroiled in an escalating trade dispute, delegates were warned to stay away from certain sensitive terms, the New York Times reports. Protectionism, for example, was off-limits because it had been used to criticize U.S. president Donald Trump for the tariffs he imposed on Chinese goods and on other G20 nations’ steel and aluminum imports. China, meanwhile, which has been accused of violating the intellectual property rights of other G20 nations, among other accusations, objected to references to fair trade practices, according to delegates.

“A number of words that we used to have always in G7 and G20 summit communiques became kind of taboos,” a European official told the Times. “We have American taboos and Chinese taboos.” In part by avoiding these taboo words, delegates were able to negotiate a communique that pledged to reform the World Trade Organization, a widely shared goal.

It’s not unusual for negotiators to bristle at hot-button terms, especially ones they view as critical of their views and behavior. Try to identify such taboo words, and avoid them when possible, even as you negotiate the substance behind them—for example, negotiating intellectual property rights without referencing the umbrella of fair trade practices.

Negotiate disadvantageous terms

What should you do when a counterpart uses a word or term that seems unworkable to you? Take the case of the recent North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) renegotiations among Canada, Mexico, and the United States. In October 2017, U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer made a controversial proposal requiring that half the content of cars built in North America come from the United States. Canada and Mexico considered the proposal to be incompatible with NAFTA’s goal of integrating the continent.

When the delegates from the Group of 20—the world’s 20 largest economies, or G20—met in Buenos Aires, Argentina, this past Decemberto negotiate reforms to the global trading system, the words they didn’t use turned out to be just as important as the ones they did.

What to do? A Canadian trade bureaucrat charged with troubleshooting the issue proposed changing the criteria for what counts as “North American content” to emphasize high-value input, such as software, according to the Wall Street Journal. The change would boost production in either the United States or Canada, where software development is more common than it is in Mexico. The revised criteria appeared to meet the spirit of Lighthizer’s proposal without explicitly giving the United States an advantage.

Two months after the Canadian team pitched the idea, the American team presented a counterproposal that would require a certain percentage of cars produced in North America to be made with high-wage labor, which would exclude Mexico unless wages rose there. Mexico’s new president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, viewed the offer as an opportunity to boost the wages of Mexican autoworkers and got behind the plan. The United States and Mexico reached agreement on that and other issues in August, and Canada signed on in September.

The lesson: If you don’t like the way a counterpart is defining a term, see if you can redefine it rather than reject it outright.

Beware linguistic mimicry

When conversational partners mimic each other’s body language, it can be a sign that they’re deeply engaged in the exchange. We might assume, therefore, that the more closely negotiating partners’ linguistic styles match up, the better their bargaining outcomes will be. However, research by Texas Tech University professor Molly Ireland and University of Texas professor Marlone Henderson published in the journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research and discussed in Discover magazine tells a more complex story.

Ireland and Henderson analyzed transcripts of typed instant messages between study participants playing
the role of coworkers negotiating travel plans for a business trip. Specifically, they looked at the participants’ use of seemingly innocuous parts of speech that have been found to be the most revealing of people’s underlying psychology: personal pronouns (such as I or we), impersonal pronouns (it and that), articles (a, an, or the), and contractions (don’t versus do not). Contrary to intuition, the researchers found that the more participants’ linguistic styles synced up, the less likely they were to reach agreement.

Why? The answer came when Ireland analyzed the degree to which the participants used travel words, such as car, hotel, and train—that is, words related to the negotiation task. Interestingly, the more they used such words, the less their linguistic styles matched. It seems that the time they spent tuning in to each other’s thoughts and emotions distracted them from the task at hand.

In other research, Ireland found that speed daters were more likely to pair up—and dating couples were more likely to be together after several months—when their linguistic styles closely matched. Therefore, in relationship-oriented interactions and negotiations, linguistic mimicry can be an asset. But in business contexts, such matching can be an indication of lack of focus.

Linguistic matching can be very difficult to detect because it relies on unobtrusive parts of speech. But if you do notice that you and your counterpart are using the same verbal tics, it could be a sign you need to get back on track.