Wharton study finds negotiators lie more often to women than men

Future career women at Penn, the world of business might be more deceptive than you think.

Jessica Kennedy , a former legal studies and business ethics researcher at Wharton , found in a study with two researchers from UC Berkeley that people lie to women in negotiations more often than they lie to men.

The study — in a forthcoming issue of the journal Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes — was based on simulated negotiations among students in MBA classes at another university, where all the students had an incentive to perform well and boost their reputations. The simulated negotiations were mostly distributor or real estate negotiations where “buyer’s gain was the seller’s loss,” Kennedy said.

This competitive negotiation setting was designed to be similar to real-world situations in which it is costly for negotiators to lie if their partners discover the deception.

To Kennedy’s surprise, the negotiators lied 17 percent more when their counterparts were women.

“There wasn’t any evidence that women are easier to deceive,” Kennedy said. “People just have stereotypes about how easily misled women are.”

The quality of lies was also noticeably different. Agents tended to say lies that are based on true facts to men, whereas they gave blatant lies to women.

However, the study indicated that it was not just men who hold the stereotype.

“It’s kind of unusual that women lie more to women as well,” Kennedy said. She explained that in cases where women are acting as seller’s agents, they think they are representing someone else’s interest and assume the same stereotypes the seller has.

Kennedy’s study is not the only one that articulates why and in what ways women encounter additional hurdles in pursuing their careers . Research by Hannah Bowles of Harvard Business School , whose focus is on “gender in negotiation and the attainment of leadership positions,” confirms that both men and women are less interested in working with women who negotiate for a higher salary.

The two studies both demonstrate that in the world of business, women often tend to collaborate in creating a biased environment.

“Both men and women have to undergo a paradigm shift in treating men and women equally,” said Meaghan Casey , a second-year MBA student and the president of Wharton Women in Business .

Casey explained that Wharton has been progressing toward creating an equal environment for both male and female business people. Forty-two percent of MBA students last year were women, and WWIB has been supporting women to become better negotiators.

“In my personal experience, it can be beneficial to build your credibility and not to do so in a way that is arrogant but just to allow others to understand that you are going into a conversation already knowledgeable about the subject,” she said.

Another possible way is to bring additional staff to back you up.

“I want Wharton [female] students to know and be aware that they are the target of negotiations,” Kennedy said. “It definitely creates an additional barrier for women to perform well.”

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