Gender & Culture at the Negotiating Table
The statement “from culture to culture and family to family, gender roles vary” is congruent with my personal experience. At 23, with already five years of corporate experience, an opportunity arose for me to move to Tokyo and work within our global office.
After working in the Japanese corporate culture for almost seven year, they expect women to be subservient. The role of a woman is still to this day the same as it was 30 years ago. There is a very particularly old traditions engaged into the working culture. (This is also true regarding age.) Even the most progressive men adhere to this cultural standard in minor ways because, come on, it is kind of nice, right?
Within my first week of working in Japan, at my very first external agency meeting, my manager expected me to order drinks and serve everyone. Being the youngest and only woman in the room, it was expected. No one informed me that this would be apart of the job, let alone at the time my Japanese language skills were nonexistent. The expectations are there whether you know it or not.
Manea, et al. (2020) review of research indicates that even in western culture, women are still encounter a disadvantage as compared to men counterparts at the negotiating table. Women tend to show more self-doubt and cannot always recognize they are at the negotiating table or tend to try and avoid it altogether. (Manea, et al., 2020)
This behavior persisted throughout my experience. Even when being the most senior person in the room, a woman’s role seems to be more of a checkbox than of any actual influence. Just when you begin to feel like progress is being made, you realize that any kind of negotiations took place over multiple meetings, including dinners and drinking hours.
Being raised in an Anglo-Jewish family, it is difficult for me to back down once my direction is determined. In Japan, my role quickly became that of constant adversity. It also took some growing pains to learn how to negotiate at their level. Being able to understand their language, whomever was at the table. The culture is very subliminal and required reading between the lines to obtain a direct answer.
In a study by Toosi, et al. (2019), they compared the intersection of gender and race during negotiations. The study indicated that white women reported lower overall than that of white men, however, Asian-American participants did not show a difference in gender, both were equally lower than their white male counterparts. The final conclusion was that not only gender but culture play a role in negations. (Toosi, et al. 2019)
The more we see women at the negotiating table speaking up for themselves, the more we can believe those traits within ourselves. However, the trouble is that we typically are not in the pay or job contract negotiations with anyone else. Therefore, it becomes difficult for us to see it in action and in real life (vs on tv).
(Originally written for a university course.)
References
Manea, C.-N., Yzerbyt, V., & Demoulin, S. (2020). He, She, “They” at the Bargaining Table… Woman, Man or Just Negotiators? A Critical Review on Gender Ideologies in Mixed-Gender Negotiations. Psychologica Belgica, 60(1), 236–254. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/pb.523
Toosi, N. R., Mor, S., Semnani-Azad, Z., Phillips, K. W., & Amanatullah, E. T. (2019). Who Can Lean In? The Intersecting Role of Race and Gender in Negotiations. Psychology of Women Quarterly, 43(1), 7–21. https://doi.org/10.1177/0361684318800492
