About this episode

This episode discusses a study showing that people prefer to negotiate with women, highlighting the importance of subjective outcomes in negotiations.

**Top Trending Friday** — our weekly pick of the top-trending paper on r/science this week. **Paper:** [People prefer to negotiate with women, even when outcomes are identical and gender is unknown](https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2523202123) **Authors:** Charlotte H. Townsend, Laura J. Kray, Solène Delecourt **Journal:** Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2026 **Why it matters:** Decades of negotiation research have focused on who wins the most money, but this paper shows that the social and emotional quality of a negotiation — and its compounding career consequences — may matter just as much. **Summary** Negotiation research has long prioritized *economic* outcomes (who captured the most value) while largely ignoring *subjective* outcomes: trust built, perceived fairness, and the counterpart's desire to negotiate again. This paper, drawing on over 2,000 observations, finds that people consistently report higher subjective value when negotiating with women — and that this preference survives even complete anonymization. In a text-chat study using a fictitious resource-allocation task, gender was so effectively hidden that third-party observers reading the transcripts…

People in this episode

Host: Raymond Ruff

Topics covered

• negotiation
• gender studies
• subjective outcomes
• economic outcomes
• social dynamics

Keywords

• negotiation
• gender preference
• subjective value
• economic outcomes
• trust

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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