The Impact of Gender Differences on Negotiations in The Workplace: Or The Underlying Effectiveness of Women

Abstract

This literature review helps explain the impact gender has on negotiations. The discussion encompassed in this review will include the impact of gender stereotypes on negotiation, continuing to how these stereotypes and other gender-related issues impact salary negotiations. It will also analyze how men and women approach negotiation with the same and opposite sex and will include a discussion on gender expectations brought about by cultural differences. It will conclude with summarized findings, inconsistencies in research, shortcomings of methodology, and direction for future research. This review’s findings are sourced from articles, academic journals, theses, and web pages. The research concluded that stereotypes do play a role in determining how people negotiate with their opposition by leveraging their position and preconceived gender-based personality traits. It also concludes that the gender pay gap can, in part, be explained by the negotiation process of salary. This is due to males dominating executive-level positions. Furthermore, men and women interact differently and achieve different outcomes depending on the gender they’re negotiating with, uniformly in favor of males. Lastly, culture also plays a role in creating gender-based stereotypes and negotiation results differ significantly from country to country due to different cultural norms and practices. It has been found, with little uncertainty, that gender does play a significant role in negotiation outcomes. A direction for future research would be to explore gender as a non-binary construct and determine negotiation outcomes across a spectrum, as well as cross-analyzing gender with other individual circumstances.