The Impact of Gender on Negotiation Performance

In 2009, Professors Russell Korobkin and Joseph Doherty published an article suggesting that male law students are more proficient negotiators than female law students. Their study was based upon student negotiation performance on a single employment discrimination hypothetical in which the only issue was money-a classic zero sum exercise, where there was no way the participants could engage in integrative bargaining based upon the different degrees to which the parties valued diverse issues. The exercise was given to 136 first-year law students at University of California-Los Angeles (U.C.L.A.) and University of Southern California (U.S.C.). The participants were not taking a course on negotiating, and had no law school training with respect to this critical lawyering skill.