Event Description:
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Waiting Room opens at 8am, Talk starts at 8:30am
CUNY Dispute Resolution Center at John Jay College
and
Association for Conflict Resolution of Greater New York
co-sponsors of the
Monthly NYC-DR Roundtable
invite everyone to
What's Sex Got to do with it? Questioning Negotiation Research on Gender With Andrea Schneider
There are (at least) three things that are wrong with research on women
and negotiation. The first is that we study gender differences in
negotiation and assume that these differences—as opposed to any other
professional, cultural, age, or experiential difference—are
determinative of differences in negotiation behavior. These stereotypes
may or may not apply to any one of us in particular. Our behaviors in
negotiation likely fall along a range from “masculine” to “feminine”
that may or may not actually match our gender. If we examined
negotiation behaviors using other lens—professional training,
experience, family and culture, geography, or birth order—just to name a
few, we would likely find similar ranges of behaviors. Second, we only
focus on assertiveness since it is the easiest one to study in a lab.
As women have been historically socialized against being assertive (with
resulting backlash if the appropriate boundaries are crossed), it is
not surprising that women are then seen as less effective in those types
of studies. And this ignores the other skills—particularly social
intuition, empathy, and ethicality—in which women appear to excel. This
leads to the third problem—focusing solely on assertiveness is not only
doing a disservice to women, it harms any negotiator who assumes that
modulating their level of assertiveness is the only thing it takes in
order to be effective. Both business and negotiation literature are
consistent in noting that these other skills are exactly the types of
skills the best leaders will possess. The studies in each of these
skillsets should help us determine what skills we have and what we are
lacking. Since empirical work often focuses on micro-skills—ability to
read emotion from the eyes, how to listen more carefully, when to make
an offer—these studies can highlight exactly what we need to consider in
order for all of us to be more effective in negotiation.
Bio
Andrea Kupfer Schneider is a Professor of Law and Director of the Kukin Program for Conflict Resolution at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. She has taught Dispute Resolution, Negotiation, Ethics, and International Conflict Resolution for over 25 years. She frequently publishes law review articles and book chapters on negotiation, gender, international conflict and dispute systems design. Professor Schneider has co-authored three textbooks, Dispute Resolution: Beyond the Adversarial Model (3d Ed., with Lela Love, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, and Michael Moffitt), and with Love and Menkel-Meadow, Negotiation: Processes for Problem-Solving and Mediation: Practice, Policy, and Ethics. Other books include: Creating the Musee D’Orsay: The Politics of Culture in France (25th Anniversary ed.); Discussions in Dispute Resolution: The Foundational Articles, edited with Art Hinshaw and Sarah Cole (which won the 2021 CPR Annual Book Award); Negotiating Crime: Plea Bargaining, Problem Solving, and Dispute Resolution in the Criminal Context with Cynthia Alkon; Negotiation Essentials for Lawyers and The Negotiator’s Desk Reference, both co-edited with Chris Honeyman, as well as Smart & Savvy: Negotiation Strategies in Academia which she co-authored with her father David Kupfer. Andrea is a founding editor of Indisputably, the blog for ADR law faculty, and started the Dispute Resolution Works-in-Progress Annual Conference in 2007. She was named 2009 Woman of the Year by the Wisconsin Law Journal and, in 2016, gave her first TEDx talk entitled Women Don’t Negotiate and Other Similar Nonsense. She was named the 2017 recipient of the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work and is a member of the American Law Institute. Andrea regularly gives negotiation trainings around the world to corporations, law firms, court systems, and, most recently, has focused on faculty in the STEM and medical fields under several federal grants. She received her A.B. cum laude from Princeton University and her J.D. cum laude from Harvard Law School. |
