Run the numbers far enough and a curious gap opens up. Take two negotiators, identical in every economic respect, closing the same deals for the same money. Let each one finish a bargain, and then let the person across the table decide whether they ever want to do it again. Over a working lifetime of such encounters, the woman ends up with roughly 45 per cent more chances to negotiate than the man, and in one worked scenario that compounds into about $55,000 more in bonuses. Nobody handed her a better hand. People just kept coming back.

That figure comes out of a Monte Carlo simulation buried in the back of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It is, on the face of it, a strange thing to find in the negotiation literature, a field that spent decades documenting the ways women lose.

The work, led by Charlotte Townsend, a post-doctoral associate at Cornell, with Laura Kray and Solène Delecourt at the University of California, Berkeley, sets out to measure something the field has mostly ignored. Not who walks away with the bigger slice, but how the other party feels about the whole exchange afterwards. Trust, fairness, the sense of having been heard. Researchers call it subjective value, and it turns out to predict long-term satisfaction better than the money does, and to predict whether you will pick up the phone to that same counterpart next time.

“So much of negotiation research has really focused on men’s advantages,” says Townsend. The early studies, the ones from the 1970s and 1980s, treated gender as a fixed dial: men bargained, women conceded, end of story.

That picture has been falling apart for years, and this paper gives it another shove. Across five studies and 2,401 participants, Townsend and colleagues find no gender gap at all in the economic spoils. Salaries, sale prices, points won in a game, the hard outcomes come out level. What is not level is the warmth left in the room. People consistently rate women partners higher on building trust, on fairness, on listening, on satisfying the other side’s needs.

The obvious objection is that this is just the old halo talking. Women are stereotyped as warmer, friendlier, easier to like; psychologists have a name for it, the rather on-the-nose “women are wonderful” effect. Maybe people are simply reporting the stereotype back to the researchers.

Stripping out the stereotype

So the team went looking for a setting where the stereotype could not operate. They turned to an archive of anonymous online negotiations, hundreds of strangers haggling by text chat over a fictional pile of campfire supplies, never told their opponent’s gender, never able to see a face or a name. Then, in a clever pretest, they showed those same transcripts to a fresh batch of readers and asked them to guess each bargainer’s gender. The guesses came out worse than a coin toss. People couldn’t tell. And yet, when the original players rated each other, women were still liked more, and that extra liking still fed straight into greater satisfaction. The preference survived the removal of every cue it was supposed to depend on.

One more twist sealed it. In a later study the researchers took the transcripts and slapped gender labels on them at random, telling some readers their partner was a woman when the writer was actually a man, and vice versa. The labels did nothing. What moved the ratings was the writer’s real gender, invisible though it was, which means the effect is riding on something in the behaviour itself rather than in the badge. Women were also judged higher on competence, not just warmth, which neatly upends the usual trade-off where one is bought at the expense of the other.

It comes down to yes

That left the hardest question: what exactly are women doing differently? To find out, the team fed real negotiation transcripts through an AI coding model built for the job at Vanderbilt’s negotiation lab, which tagged every turn of conversation, accept, reject, offer, question, and so on. The single behaviour that stood out, the one that most reliably explained why partners came away happier, was the simplest imaginable. Women were more likely to say yes. They accepted offers more often. Crucially, and this is where the old story breaks down completely, they were not caving early or settling for less; the economic ledgers stayed even. A well-timed acceptance, it seems, leaves the other person feeling heard and fairly treated, and that feeling is worth real money down the line.

There are limits, and Townsend is careful about them. These were fairly tidy situations, lab tasks and a classroom course, where everyone knew negotiating was on the menu; whether the advantage holds in murkier, higher-stakes territory is an open question. Earlier work also warns that leaning too hard on the relationship can cost you the deal, though that penalty did not show up here.

“We don’t talk enough about the social consequences in negotiations,” says Townsend, “and the importance of how your partner makes you feel.” Her broader point is that the field has measured the wrong thing for too long, fixating on the size of the prize while ignoring the relationship that decides whether there is ever a next prize to fight over.

If she is right, the implications stretch well past salary talks and into every recurring bargain we strike, with landlords, clients, co-parents, the people we will have to face across a table again and again. The lesson, oddly, is not that anyone needs to win harder. It is that women have a real strength here, one worth studying rather than apologising for, and that the rest of us might do well to learn how a timely yes keeps the door open.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do women really get paid the same in negotiations, or is this just about being liked?

The economic outcomes were level. Across all five studies, covering salaries, sale prices and points in a bargaining game, the researchers found no gender gap in what people actually walked away with. The difference was purely in how satisfied and well-disposed the other party felt afterwards.

How can a preference exist when nobody knows their partner’s gender?

That was the puzzle the researchers chased. In anonymous online negotiations, where outsiders could not guess gender better than chance, women were still liked more. And when transcripts were given fake gender labels at random, the labels had no effect; only the writer’s real gender moved the ratings. That points to something in the behaviour itself rather than to a stereotype.

What were women actually doing differently?

The standout behaviour was accepting offers. Transcript analysis showed women said yes more often, which left partners feeling heard and fairly treated. Importantly, they were not accepting earlier or settling for worse deals, so the goodwill came at no economic cost to themselves.

Could building goodwill ever backfire in a negotiation?

Possibly, and the authors flag it. Prior research warns that prioritising the relationship too heavily can leave money on the table. This study did not see that penalty, but it tested relatively clear-cut situations, so the picture could shift in higher-stakes or more ambiguous bargaining.

This article is based on research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Read the full study here: People prefer to negotiate with women, even when outcomes are identical and gender is unknown.