Looking Like a Woman Is Bad for Negotiations

The world of face-based negotiation research has not been good to women of late. First, a study showed that having a fat face can be great for men in negotiations, but not for women. Now researchers say that women may be suffering from another physical feature over which they have no control: looking like women.

A new study by researchers at Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management found that people saw womanly features as a sign of passivity and preferred to negotiate against someone who looked feminine. That held true even for men whose faces bore signs of femininity. The study defined being “womanly” not as commanding an elusive feminine air but, for both sexes, as having “less prominent eye-brow ridges, disproportionally shorter faces, less laterally prominent cheek bones, mandibles, and chins, smaller noses and fuller lips resulting in a generally less robust face shape.”