The internet always astounds me for the richness and diversity of the resources it makes available to anyone with the time and the curiosity to discover them.

Consider my latest web find: Social Innovation Conversations. Its motto proclaims its mission: “reinventing the world together one conversation at a time”.

Described as “an open and collaborative online platform for cross-sector and multidisciplinary learning for social change”, Social Innovation Conversations was launched to achieve an ambitious and inspiring goal:

From the pandemic of AIDS, to challenges posed by climate change, to substance abuse and global poverty, our world is faced with increasingly complex and pressing social and environmental challenges. While knowledge, tools, and technologies to develop innovative solutions exist, channels are still needed to reach the people who could use and apply them to social problems.

Social Innovation Conversations’ mission is to expand the reach of important and valuable knowledge to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it by recording and sharing the spoken words of thought leaders in all sectors and disciplines and offering listeners a multi-stakeholder perspective on the world grand challenges and social issues.

Teachers and students of negotiation will want to tune in to a recent podcast: “Myths and Truths About Negotiation“, a lecture by Margaret Neale, Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business. The five negotiation myths that are in for busting are:

1. Making the first offer is risky
2. Perceptions about dividing the pie
3. Honesty is the best policy
4. Emotions at the negotiation table are your enemy
5. I had no choice so I said yes

There is other knowledge worth exploring at Social Innovation Conversations — as you will discover for yourself.

Women don’t ask.

That was the premise — and the title — of a book published in 2003 by Linda Babcock, James M. Walton Professor of Economics at Carnegie Mellon University’s H. John Heinz III School of Public Policy and Management, and successful writer and editor Sara Laschever.

Women Don’t Ask explored the uncomfortable truths about gender and negotiation and exposed the obstacles that keep women from negotiating effectively for themselves. While men seem to have no trouble negotiating and asking for what they need, women hesitate or fail to ask at all.

Social conditioning and cultural expectations are among the causes of these gendered differences. Tragically these differences produce well-documented economic costs for women, haunting them over the course of a lifetime. For example, according to the Women Don’t Ask web site, “By not negotiating a first salary, an individual stands to lose more than $500,000 by age 60 — and men are more than four times as likely as women to negotiate a first salary.”

This book touched a raw nerve for the many women who read it; indeed, so overwhelming was the response to Women Don’t Ask that Babcock and Laschever went to work on a sequel.

The result is Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want, a book filled with practical advice; real-world negotiation stories from the authors, the women who have contacted them as a result of their work, and Babcock’s students; and a detailed four-phase program with exercises for preparing for and succeeding in life’s negotiations.

Phase One teaches women to recognize that “Everything Is Negotiable”. As anyone knows, the toughest negotiation can be with yourself, and the authors help readers begin by asking questions of themselves to identify and clarify their professional and personal goals. Phase Two teaches readers how to “Lay the Groundwork”, reviewing the skills and concepts of basic negotiation strategy. Among the most important lessons? Information is power — and the authors explain how and where to get it to strengthen your bargaining position.

Phase Three, “Get Ready”, pushes women to aim high when it comes to negotiating. It covers cooperative bargaining; ascertaining your worth; using logrolling or trade-offs to get past jams and build value; and how to make the first offer. Best of all, it even comes equipped with a “Negotiation Gym” — a six-week program of increasingly difficult negotiation exercises that will help women build negotiation muscles and develop stamina and strength in preparation for tougher negotiation challenges. No one will ever kick sand in your face again.

Phase Four shows how women can “Put It All Together” — to practice in advance by role playing with a friend, to avoid making concessions prematurely, to create the right impression to influence your counterpart at the table, and, finally, to close the deal.

An appendix helpfully provides a detailed worksheet to help women prepare for negotiations, along with a link to the web site where readers can download a PDF version.

Ask for It recounts numerous stories of women facing negotiations at work and in their lives, across a range of industries and professions, which bring the lessons to memorable life. However, as convincing as these anecdotes may be, I would have welcomed more examples of negotiations in blue-collar settings, my one quibble with an otherwise excellent book.

What makes this book a must-read for men, too, and not just for women are its unpleasant revelations about the realities of hidden bias against women at the negotiation table. The authors exhort readers to take responsibility themselves for combating gender bias, not just that of others but particularly their own. They remind readers that all of us regardless of gender possess assumptions and unexamined beliefs about women in negotiation. They point to studies that indicate that while aggression earns men points at the negotiation table, it punishes women with backlash and disapproval. And, while the authors fiercely advocate for women at the negotiation table, the chapter on “Likability” with its insistence that women avoid aggressive tactics and “be nice” while bargaining, will no doubt leave some readers bristling. However, until the world changes how it views women in negotiation, it’s hard to argue with the studies the authors cite.

There is much to admire about this gutsy book with its commitment to helping women really succeed at negotiating. Even the title itself serves as a defiant call to action. Babcock and Laschever explain in the forward that the title represents a deliberate effort to reclaim a phrase weighted with negative meaning for women and instead assert it as an emblem of power:

For centuries the phrase “asking for it” has been used as an accusing finger to point at women. A woman who’d been sexually assault was “asking for it”. A woman who’d been the victim of spousal abuse must have provoked her partner — she “asked for it”.

Our goal is to help women ask for and get the things they — we — really want, to claim the phrase “asking for it” as our own and transform it into a dynamic tool for increasing our happiness and pursuing our dreams.

This is not simply a book about changing the way women negotiate. Instead, Babcock and Laschever have ambitiously set out to change women’s lives.

Any of us can join the revolution — all we have to do is ask.

Five years ago Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever published Women Don’t Ask, a book that ripped the lid off of one of negotiation’s most intractable problems: the challenges that women face in negotiating successfully. They examined the barriers — institutional, cultural, and social — that hold women back and provided strategies to help women conquer the gender divide at the negotiation table to ask for and get what they want.

Women Don’t Ask touched a responsive chord in women nationally and internationally, many of whom had encountered these barriers up close. Many women contacted the authors to thank them for writing a book that opened up their eyes to negotiation’s possibilities and to ask for help with their own negotiations. This enthusiastic response motivated Babcock and Laschever to write a second book, the recently published Ask for It: How Women Can Use the Power of Negotiation to Get What They Really Want.

I plan to post a review of this book later this week, but one thing I can tell you right now is that it may be one of the best books on negotiation I’ve ever read. What Tammy Lenski recently did for mediation marketing, Ask for It does for real women facing real-world negotiations — women who want practical, common sense advice and tools for being effective negotiators. The advice is so good though and the revelations about gender issues at the negotiation table so disturbing that men should read it, too — not just to learn better ways to negotiate but to find out how any of us can battle gender bias in negotiation.

The Ask for It web site provides support for negotiating women, everything from downloadable worksheets and information to links to online resources, including Babcock’s work helping girls learn to negotiate.

There’s even (be still my heart) a blog. Although the blog is new with just three posts so far, if “Scary Monster(.com)” and “Cut Throat Bitch“, with their gutsy commentary on negotiation and gender, are any indication of what’s to come, this is one negotiation blog you’ll want to follow.

If you’re interested in learning more about the resolution of international disputes or other topics that concern the practice of dispute resolution and negotiation abroad, there is no better resource than the International Dispute Negotiation (IDN) podcast series.

IDN is hosted by Michael McIlwrath, Senior Counsel, Litigation for GE Infrastructure - Oil & Gas. The two latest issues of this excellent series are #16, “How to Borrow a Mediator’s Powers” with ADR scholar Professor Dwight Golann from my alma mater Suffolk University Law School in Boston; and #17, “Offshore Litigation Work in India“, in which Mike pays a visit to Mumbai to explore this controversial method of reducing litigation costs in common law systems and talks to the founder of successful outsourcing firm Pangea3, and to one of its top managers.

In an increasingly global business world, for many English serves as a lingua franca. To help those who need to conduct their business in English with colleagues or customers overseas, theEnglishWeb.com provides advice for using English in the workplace, together with cultural tips, with articles on effective communication in business English situations.

A recent post lists 10 idioms that relate to negotiation. There’s also advice for successful negotiations.

In this election year, everyone’s paying a lot of attention to the negotiation styles of the presidential contenders, as I pointed out in a recent post.

The most recent commentary comes from the blog Daily Kos (thanks to fellow blogger Victoria Pynchon for the link), which discusses the substantive differences in the negotiation styles of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

By engaging all parties in negotiations, and reaching a collective agreement about how much weight to give to each variable, it is possible to provide some benefit to each party, although no-one [sic] gets exactly what he or she wants. This is integrative bargaining. I have a strong hunch that Senator Obama learned about this in law school, and applied it during his work as a community organizer. When he talks about having all parties sit down to negotiate about health care, this is what he has in mind. When Senator Clinton talks about defeating the enemies of her health care plan, she is talking about zero-sum bargaining. The 50% + 1 approach to winning elections is zero-sum. Her argument that she will break the glass ceiling by being elected president is also zero-sum; for a woman to win, a man has to lose.

Give me a break. It’s Daily Kos that’s created the zero-sum game, one which Clinton can’t possibly win. You’re either a value-creating negotiator (good), or you’re a value-claiming one (bad). There’s not a lot of room here for nuance. Indeed, this kind of reasoning evokes Orwell’s doomed sheep bleating, “Four legs good, two legs bad.”

The truth is that life — and negotiation — are never that simple.

Personally, for a change, I’d like to see the White House inhabited by a president who is skilled in many styles of negotiating. Someone who possesses the flexibility, sophistication, and wit to deploy the appropriate negotiation strategy, or indeed as many strategies as are necessary. Not every negotiation merits a collaborative approach. And sometimes getting to yes is a really bad idea.

No matter what, there is one negotiating style in particular the next administration should practice: what Bargaining for Advantage author G. Richard Shell calls “information-based bargaining”. A common-sense approach, it focuses on “solid planning and preparation before you start, careful listening so you can find out what the other side really wants, and attending to the ’signals’ the other party sends through his or her conduct once bargaining gets underway.”

We could all do with a lot more solid planning and a whole lot more careful listening by our elected leaders.

Otherwise, once again, we’ll end up with less than we bargained for.

The National Iranian American Council reports that Ambassador John Limbert, one of the 52 US diplomats who was held hostage at the United States Embassy in Iran in 1980, has published “Negotiating with the Islamic Republic of Iran: Raising the Chances for Success – 15 Points to Remember” (PDF), a guide for negotiations between the U.S. and Iran.

Limbert’s 15 points are:

1. Negotiating with Iran—hard as it may be—is worth doing.
2. Establish objective criteria free of legalisms.
3. The past matters: Be aware of Iran’s historical greatness, its recent weakness, and its grievances from decades or centuries earlier.
4. Choose intermediaries with great care.
5. Talk to the right people.
6. Understand that the Islamic Republic’s priority is survival.
7. Let the Iranians define what is in their national interest.
8. Understand the Iranian BATNA: Expect actions that may appear (to you) self-destructive.
9. Give your Iranian counterparts credit for intelligence.
10. Expect a case based on vague and uncertain claims.
11. Expect grandstanding, political theater, and flamboyant gestures.
12. Remember that power is respected, weakness despised.
13. Understand that justice, often in a harsh version, in the abstract is extremely important.
14. Remember that conspiracy theories have great currency—and are sometimes true.
15. Expect hands to be overplayed.

Limbert says,

What works in any negotiation—being prepared, building relationships, exercising patience, knowing both one’s own and the other side’s BATNA, understanding the other side’s real interests, among other things—can work in negotiations with the Islamic Republic.

Throughout this election season here in the US, there’s been a lot of talk about the candidates and their skills in, or positions on, negotiating.

Barack Obama took heat for saying he’d talk with Iran, as Republican contenders insisted they wouldn’t negotiate with terrorists, while Hillary kept changing her mind whether she would or not.

Meanwhile from the mediation community we’ve heard Robert Benjamin’s views as a hard core negotiator on one of the candidates, countered by a deft parry from conflict management professor Darrell Puls.

With so much at stake here in the U.S. presidential elections — jobs, the economy, health care, foreign relations, national security, the war in Iraq, civil liberties, education, the environment, you name it — it’s surprising that no one’s talking about the negotiation skills of the one person who matters most here: the American voter. That’s the person we should be most concerned with, since it is this person who will ultimately determine (dodgy electronic voting machines and Florida recounts aside) who will occupy the White House in 2009.

What kind of negotiator is this person? How prepared are they for the negotiation in the voting booth? That’s what I want to know.

I therefore propose three negotiation tips for voters to aid them as they decide which political candidate to pull the lever for come November.

Negotiation Tip No. 1: Be prepared.

Many negotiators agree on the importance of preparation. The more you ask questions, the more you listen, the more you learn, the more you’ve taken time to understand the interests at stake and evaluate the options available, the better the position you’re in to negotiate. An election’s no different. Knowledge is power, both at the negotiation table and in the voting booth.

In fact, you owe it to yourself to seek your information from sources that are as reliable and as objective as possible. Forget what the candidates, your favorite radio station, or your Uncle Dave tell you. Visit sites like The Fact Checker, FactCheck.org, or PolitiFact.com to learn what the spin-doctors don’t want you to know. As The Who once said, “Won’t get fooled again.” Let that be your anthem.

Negotiation Tip No. 2: Watch out for cognitive biases.

As humans, we all fall prey to cognitive errors — the mistakes our minds commit as we make decisions or form judgments. In fact, here’s a whole list of them to guard against. In particular, watch out for confirmation bias — the tendency to seek out information that supports your position.

Negotiation Tip No. 3: Arm yourself against the weapons of influence.

In his classic work, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, Robert Cialdini details our susceptibility to the manipulations of others. He warns of how easily we succumb to influence, what he calls the click, whirr of human behavior. Click, the behavioral trigger is activated. Whirr, we irresistibly respond. For example, researchers have documented how effective authority can be for influencing everything from consumer purchasing decisions (consider the controversy over Dr. Robert Jarvik’s endorsement of Lipitor) to support for a political candidate (think Chuck Norris or Oprah Winfrey).

For a description of the strategies of influence at work, Victoria Pynchon writing at Settle It Now Negotiation Blog lists six basic principles of persuasion that you may already be at the mercy of.

* * * * * * * * * *

With these three tips, you’ll be ready for anything that the pundits and the pols dish out. Just remember, even if you don’t believe in negotiating with terrorists, at least be willing to negotiate with yourself before you vote.

Anyone who has raised kids knows that there is no tougher negotiator than the average nine year old. Help has at last arrived for parents eager to negotiate more effectively with their own children.

The February issue of Negotiation offers tips to “Negotiate Better Relationships with Your Children” (PDF). Negotiation is a monthly newsletter produced by the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. Learning to negotiate with your kids produces real benefits, including more cooperative children and more trust between parents and children:

Just as smart business negotiators avoid bullying tactics and undue concessions, relationship-centered parents engage in a problem-solving process that enhances cooperation and satisfaction for the entire family. Rather than pretending that conflict always can be avoided or behaving as though kids must be dominated, these parents teach their children to deal with conflict in productive ways.

Deepak Malhotra and Max H. Bazerman, professors at Harvard Business School and recognized negotiation experts, have published a paper available to the public for downloading that ponders the “Psychological Influence in Negotiation: An Introduction Long Overdue“. (Direct link to PDF download here.)

For anyone who studies or teaches negotiation, or negotiates frequently (and that, my friends, includes every single one of you — any time you’re trying to talk things through with someone else, you’re negotiating), this paper provides important information presented in an accessible and highly readable format.

This paper discusses the causes and consequences of the (surprisingly) limited extent towhich social influence research has penetrated the field of negotiation, and then presents a framework for bridging the gap between these two literatures. The paper notes that one of the reasons for its limited impact on negotiation research is that extant research on social influence focuses almost exclusively on economic or structural levers of influence. With this in mind, the aper seeks to achieve five objectives:

(1) Define the domain of psychological influence as consisting of those tactics which do not require the influencer to change the economic or structural aspects of the bargaining situation in order to persuade the target;

(2) Review prior research on behavioral decision making to identify ideas that may be relevant to the domain of psychological influence;

(3) Provide a series of examples of how behavioral decision research can be leveraged to create psychological influence tactics for use in negotiation;

(4) Consider the other side of influence, i.e., how targets of influence might defend against the tactics herein considered; and

(5) Consider some of the ethical issues surrounding the use of psychological influence in negotiation.

To consider how best to influence your counterpart at the negotiation table and counter in turn the influence they themselves wield, you’ll want to read more.

For learning more about mastering negotiation, in particular the power of influence and persuasion, Malhotra and Bazerman’s recent book, Negotiation Genius: How to Overcome Obstacles and Achieve Brilliant Results at the Bargaining Table and Beyond, serves as an excellent resource.

One of the best blogs on cognition, behavior, and the mind sciences is The Situationist, which examines the implications of social psychology for law, policymaking, and legal theory. In honor of Martin Luther King Day, which is celebrated in the U.S. today, The Situationist has republished a post from 2007, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Situationism“.

Pointing to excerpts from the text of King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, this post makes the case that “Martin Luther King, Jr. was, among other things, a situationist“:

To be sure, King is most revered in some circles for quotations that are easily construed as dispositionist, such as: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Taken alone, as it often is, that sentence seems to set a low bar. Indeed, some Americans contend that we’ve arrived at that promised land; after all, most of us (mostly incorrectly) imagine ourselves to be judging people based solely on their dispositions, choices, personalities, or, in short, their characters.

Putting King’s quotation in context, however, it becomes clear that his was largely a situationist message. He was encouraging us all to recognize the subtle and not-so-subtle situational forces that caused inequalities and to question (what John Jost calls) system-justifying ideologies that helped maintain those inequalities.

In reading King’s movingly written “Letter”, and The Situationist post, I would say that not only was King a situationist but a skilled master of negotiation and conflict resolution. Consider what King says about community and the mutual responsibility that flows from it:

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

Or this about negotiation and the need to confront issues and talk them through:

You may well ask: “Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches and so forth? Isn’t negotiation a better path?” You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent-resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.

The purpose of our direct-action program is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

Read King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail“. What messages does it hold for you, as a mediator, as a negotiator, as a resolver of disputes, or simply as a human being?

One of the trickiest stages of any negotiation is when to make the first offer.

No one ever wants to go first. But that first number possesses almost talismanic properties — it can profoundly influence how the other side perceives the value of what you demand. Studies have in fact shown that negotiators who make the first offer often do better than those who wait. Why? According to an article by Kellogg School of Management Morris and Alice Kaplan Professor of Ethics and Decision in Management Adam Galinsky,

The answer lies in the fact that every item under negotiation (whether it’s a company or a car) has both positive and negative qualities — qualities that suggest a higher price and qualities that suggest a lower price. High anchors selectively direct our attention toward an item’s positive attributes; low anchors direct our attention to its flaws…

Anchoring research helps clarify the question of whether to make the first offer in a negotiation: by making the first offer, you will anchor the negotiation in your favor…

While this may be true, Galinsky has also found that one of the most common negotiation mistakes is to make a first offer that isn’t aggressive enough.

An aggressive first offer can work in your favor for several reasons. Take the perspective of the seller: more extreme first offers lead to higher final settlements. For example, higher listing prices lead to higher final sale prices in real estate transactions because, as we’ve seen, high-anchor offers lead buyers to focus on a negotiated item’s positive attributes. In addition, an aggressive first offer allows you to offer concessions and still reach an agreement that’s much better than your alternatives…

One of the best predictors of negotiator satisfaction with an outcome is the number and size of the concessions extracted from an opponent. By making an aggressive first offer and giving your opponent the opportunity to “extract” concessions from you, you’ll not only get a better outcome, but you’ll also increase the other side’s satisfaction.

While starting with an aggressive first offer can give a negotiator the edge at the table, there is a caveat:

Of course, it’s important that your opening offer isn’t absurdly aggressive. The first offer provides preliminary insight into the bargaining zone and range of possible agreements. An absurd offer can lead the receiver to believe that no agreement exists that will be acceptable to you both and therefore can cause her to walk away from the negotiation.

Unfortunately an unidentified Katrina victim didn’t have the benefit of Galinsky’s wisdom: this individual filed a claim with the United States Army Corps of Engineers seeking more than $3 quadrillion in compensation.

(Hat tip to Lowering the Bar.)

What difference does gender make in negotiation? Although both men and women in business strive to be leaders at the negotiation table, there are potential traps that women need to be on guard against, according to the speakers at a recent seminar of the Women’s Law Association of Ontario.

Leadership communication expert Donna Goodhand and attorney and negotiation coach Delee Fromm had advice tailored for women who want to become more persuasive and effective negotiators:

“People respond more to the person representing the cause than they do to the cause itself,” Goodhand said, emphasizing the importance of image. “If we want to be seen as leaders in our realm, if we want our ideas to be credited and our voices to be heard, then it’s essential that we take a persuasive presence into our encounters.”

Emphasized were the importance of:

• developing a vocal presence - women are socialized to speak quietly and use their “indoor voice”
• avoiding “undermining openers” like “It’s probably just me” or “I guess what I’m trying to say” in a competitive negotiation
• strategic, context-specific use of different negotiating styles

To read more on gender and negotiation, here some posts from the MediationChannel.com archives:

• A woman’s place is in the driver’s seat: Thoughts on negotiation and gender in the car dealer’s showroom
• Leveling the playing field: Neutralizing gender differences in negotiation
• More than we bargained for: Does gender matter in negotiation?

Those of you who are teachers or students of negotiation are no doubt familiar with one of the field’s best known texts, Negotiation: Readings, Exercises, and Cases, by Roy Lewicki et al.

One of its exercises, “Collecting Nos”, is designed to aid students in confronting and overcoming what is for many an overpowering fear and a mighty stumbling block to effective negotiation: the anxiety associated with asking for stuff.

Asking is hard for obvious reasons. We worry that our request will be denied — rejection is tough. Or we’re concerned that we’ll be perceived as pushy or demanding. Or we’ve been taught that it’s rude. But that kind of thinking can get in your way of getting what you need — and keep you from being a good negotiator.

To complete the “Collecting Nos” exercise, you must make requests of others until you have collected 10 nos. My partner Moshe Cohen, who uses this exercise with his students at Boston University School of Management, further specifies that you are limited to one request per person and that the person you make the request of must have the power to grant it.

To vary the exercise slightly, if you get a “no”, ask that person again later on a second time. If they still say no, ask, “What would have to happen for you to say yes?”

In completing this exercise, people make two surprising discoveries: first, how difficult collecting 10 nos turns out to be — people are often much more willing to say yes to requests; and second, good things happen when you ask. Clients I have assigned this exercise to have reported negotiating better fee agreements with their own clients, salary increases, and even job interviews.

It just goes to show you that it never hurts to ask.  So why not try the “Collecting Nos” exercise for yourself?  Who knows what might happen.

(Source for “Collecting Nos”: Negotiation: Readings, Exercises, and Cases, Roy Lewicki et al., 5th edition, p. 570.)

A newly released paper (December 2007), written by scholars Hannah Riley Bowles, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and Kathleen L. McGinn, Harvard Business School, considers the “Untapped Potential in the Study of Negotiation and Gender Inequality in Organizations” (in PDF).

Here’s an excerpt:

The literature on gender in job negotiations helps to explain gender differences in compensation among managers and professionals. It also suggests explanations for the gender asymmetric distribution of other types of negotiable resources and career opportunities within organizations. This literature shows that, even before any interaction takes place, gender is likely to influence the negotiation expectations of those who control the organizational resources and opportunities as well as of those who seek them. Particularly in contexts in which resources and opportunities tend to flow to men—for instance, because the industry, occupation or organizational hierarchy is male dominated—the expectations for men to receive such organizational benefits are likely to be higher than for women, and prenegotiation expectations tend to predict outcomes. Even if men and women have the same aspirations, gendered behavioral norms may constrain women from negotiating as effectively as men. For instance, concerned about the social risks of negotiating, women may be more reticent than their male peers to request greater resources and career opportunities.

(Via Docuticker.)