My last blog post about the conference in Istanbul is on gender.  The first conference of this project was last May in Rome, resulting in a book, Rethinking Negotiation Teaching, and a set of articles for the Negotiation Journal.  One of the purposes of these conferences is to encourage, if not mandate, cross-disciplinary author teams.  So, in Rome, I teamed with business professors Cathy Tinsley and Emily Amantullah, and conflict resolution professor Sandra Cheldelin to write two pieces, one, the book chapter, focusing on how the US election reflected the likeability v. competence dichotomy often faced by women leaders (linked here) and the second, in the Negotiation Journal, focusing more particularly on how we best teach all negotiators to deal with gendered issues (linked here).  This collaboration has been wonderfully fruitful—a third article for the AALS Section on Women in Law symposium last spring published in Hamline’s Journal of Law and Public Policy more specifically focused on what is going on in law schools. 

This time in Istanbul, Sandy Cheldelin and I presented a short piece on my lastest research, showing that lawyers in the US do not face the same likeability v. competence backlash and  that women lawyers—at least those graduating from Marquette—negotiate their salaries at the same if not slightly higher rate than men—again contradicting research in other domains about the rate of negotiation.  What was fascinating was the audience and how these gender challenges are perceived around the world.  In some ways, we in the US are trying to figure out gender 2.0—what do we do now to deal with, as Debbie Kolb would describe it, gendered contexts and the more subtle discrimination that still occurs. 

For the women in our international audience, representing Turkey, Spain and Israel, it was clear that these countries are not at gender context 2.0 at all.  Particularly in Turkey, the laws and rights of women are still non-existant—there is no conception or agreement that discrimination in hiring, salary or promotion is a bad thing.  Becoming more sophisticated about how to deal with core stereotypes in the US, for example as we described in our Negotiation Journal article, is not the point for Turkish women.  It actually reminded me a lot about what we write about in dispute system design—our system of consensul dispute resolution works, in major part, because the shadow of the law and courts in which it operates is perceived as fair and just.  As Nancy Welsh writes with procedural justice, parties need voice in order to feel fairly treated.  Here in Turkey, the women lack voice or even the laws that would mandate that voice.  Our next article will try to make sense of all of this–how do we recognize which gendered order we are operating in and then how can we best negotiate for ourselves given that cultural/religious/professional/gendered context we are in?