(Opinion piece by Lana Vukmirovic Misic, Senior Partner at JPM Partners, Montenegro, specializing in M&A and Commercial Law)
Recently, I came across a fascinating experiment by economist Corinne Low, which examines how men and women negotiate when the stakes are simple but meaningful: how to split 20 dollars.
Together with Jenny Huang, she invited participants to negotiate with a randomly assigned partner. They had only two options: a 15–5 split (in either direction). If they failed to agree, they would both walk away with zero.
The results were striking:
• Men and women performed equally well when negotiating against one another.
• Women also negotiated effectively with other women, reaching agreements at similar rates.
• But male–male pairs consistently achieved the worst outcomes.
• They were 250% more likely to end up with a zero-zero result because negotiations collapsed.
• In total, male–male pairs earned 20% less than all other pairings.
The data made one conclusion very clear:
As long as at least one woman was at the table, a mutually beneficial deal was almost always reached. Not because women lacked ambition, but because they were more effective at avoiding unproductive “all or nothing” deadlock.
These findings complement the well-known research of Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund, who showed that gender differences in competition often reflect excessive over-competitiveness among men, not a lack of competitiveness among women.
Christine Lagarde put it memorably:
“If it had been Lehman Sisters instad of Lehman Brothers it would be a different world.”
I encourage you to explore the research behind these studies or simply listen to Corinne Low’s conversation in The Guilty Feminist podcast as a great starting point.
