Communication Architecture Affects Gender Differences in Negotiation

Abstract

Women tend to face worse outcomes than men in negotiations. Prior work documenting the gender earnings gap in negotiations has primarily focused on hypothetical, face-to-face negotiations in contextualized environments. Given the ubiquity of various methods of communication in everyday life that reveal versus obscure gender, such as chat, phone calls, and video calls in the workplace, we examine the extent to which agender gap in negotiation outcomes varies across settings in which gender is obscured versus revealed. Using context-free, incentivized experiments, we test how the architecture of different virtual communications affects the presence and extent of gender differences in negotiation outcomes. Experimental subjects negotiate over a context-free good in one of five communication modes that mimic naturalistic settings. When the architecture reveals gender (i.e., through video, image, or voice), women earn 6.2% less than men. However, when the architecture obscures gender (i.e., in anonymous messaging or via altered voice), there is no gender earnings gap. We discuss potential mechanisms and implications for efficiency.

Keywords: negotiation, gender earnings gap, communication architecture, unstructured bargaining

JEL Classification: J16, C78, C91