One supposed reason for the gender pay gap is that women are worse negotiators than men, and therefore when it comes time to push for a higher salary, they tend to lag behind their male peers. It’s a stereotype that is put to the test in research from the University of Southern California, which finds that, generally speaking, men and women are just as bad as each other at negotiating.

The study found that nearly half of the volunteers didn’t really negotiate at all, with the typical participant leaving around 20% of value on the table. The results illustrate the importance of negotiating, with those who did so able to secure around $13,000 extra compared to those who didn’t negotiate at all.

Tech support

As Orly Lobel explains in The Equality Machine, chatbots may be able to help somewhat due to their ability to anonymize proceedings, while also helping people to negotiate more effectively. This is ably demonstrated by a second study from USC, which found that when people had a virtual agent doing their bidding for them in a negotiation, they can often be far more ruthless than they would be in person.

“People with less experience may not be confident that they can use the techniques or feel uncomfortable, but they have no problem programming an agent to do that,” the researchers explain.

Similar findings have emerged from the annual Automated Negotiating Agent Competition, which regularly features hundreds of participants from across the world in the development of chatbots that can effectively negotiate both with one another and with humans.

Competitions like this have helped us to better understand the various ways in which women can be penalized during negotiations. For instance, the USC study underlines how bad we all tend to be at negotiations, but it also highlights some gender-based divisions, such as the general lack of popularity for stock options among women compared to men.

“These advances can also help with negotiation disparities across different identities,” Lobel says. “We can envision bots learning about negotiation differences and ultimately countering such differences to create more equitable exchanges, level the playing field, and achieve fair outcomes.”