Using Intelligent Agents to Examine Gender in Negotiations

Women earn less than men in technical fields. Competing theories have been offered to explain this disparity. Some argue that women underperform in negotiating their salary, in-part due to language in job descriptions, called gender triggers, which leave women feeling disadvantaged in salary negotiations. Others point to structural and institutional bias: i.e., recruiters make better offers to men even when women exhibit equal negotiation skills. As a final salary is co-constructed though an interaction between employees and recruiters, it is difficult to disentangle these views. Here, we discuss how intelligent virtual agents serve as powerful methodological tools that lend new insight into this psychological debate. We use virtual negotiators to examine the impact of gender triggers on computer science (CS) undergraduates that engaged in a simulated salary negotiation with an automated recruiter. We find that, regardless of gender, CS students are reluctant to negotiate, and this hesitancy likely lowers their starting salary. Even when they negotiate, students show little skill in discovering tradeoffs that could enhance their salary, highlighting the need for negotiation training in technical fields. Most importantly, we find little evidence that gender triggers impact women's negotiated outcomes, at least within the field of CS. We argue that findings that emphasize women's individual deficits may reflect a lack of experimental control, which intelligent agents can help correct, and that structural and institutional explanations of inequity deserve greater attention.