Nolan Martin :
Hello and welcome to the NEGOTIATEx podcast. I am your co-founder and co-host Nolan Martin. And with me as always is my good friend, Aram Donigian.
Aram Donigian :
Thanks, Nolan. It’s a pleasure to introduce Joan Moon, founder of Moon Negotiation, where she trains women how to navigate gender bias and negotiation. She was the founding coach for both the Negotiation Coaching Clinic at the Negotiation and Conflict Resolution Collaboratory at Harvard Center for Public Leadership and the Career Negotiation Coaching Program at the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard.
Previously, Joan was a Teach for America core member, Bronx school teacher and management consultant. Joan has a BA in Education and sociology from Emory University, an MS in Education from Hunter College and a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School. She’s also a certified mediator in Massachusetts. Thank you for joining us today, Joan.
Joan Moon :
Thank you, Aram and Nolan for having me.
AD :
So Joan, I would love to get started by asking a little bit about the journey you’ve been on that has led you to establish Moon Negotiation. Was this where you always saw yourself getting to?
A Journey From Classroom Challenges To Mastering Negotiation [01:53]
JM :
Not at all, not at all. I always saw myself helping people. So right out of college, I was working with at-Risk Youth in Atlanta, and then I joined Teach for America, and I was teaching in the Bronx for seven years, as you mentioned in my introduction. And throughout those seven years, I started to get super, super burnt out. Teaching is an incredibly emotionally, psychologically, and physically demanding job. I was at a school where a hundred percent of the students received free lunches, and we describe the kids as kids, but with grownup problems.
So a lot of systemic issues that were affecting my students. And I was burning out, my physical health was starting to be affected by continuing this job. So I was feeling pretty powerless. It was doing what I could for my students. And then I had a student destiny hand me a post-it, and she said, Ms. Moon, are you doing okay?
You’re sighing out loud really loudly a lot. And I was like, whew, you know what? This is a sign. I can’t stay in a job where I’m not able to give a hundred percent. And so I decided to pursue grad school. I went the Kennedy School to focus on education policy actually. But I happened to fall in love with negotiation because what I was experiencing was a feeling of empowerment. Like I had agency again.
And after feeling pretty disenfranchised with our public education system, I was finding that I could use influence in a positive way. And so that’s where I fell in love with negotiation. I was working with Professor Brian Mandela at the Harvard Kennedy School and with Professor Hannah Riley Bowles, who you’ve probably seen her research, incredible research on gender and negotiation.
AD :
Absolutely.
JM :
And so in my second year, I was head of the women’s student group on campus, and we conducted a survey on campus where we found that negotiation was the most requested professional development opportunity, and it was a huge, huge outlier from all the women. So there was a huge demand from more negotiation training, and it makes sense, right? In the last decade, we’ve heard so much about the gender pay gap.
Women are feeling incredible pressure to negotiate and advocate for themselves. So I had worked on developing the negotiation coaching clinic, and I went to Hannah Riley Bowls and I pitched her, let’s do a women’s version of this program. And so the Women in Public Policy Program funded this opportunity. And after graduating, I decided to stay on longer and continue to do this work with Hannah at the Women in Public Policy Program. And during that fellowship, when I stayed at campus, I had this full program where we were coaching students on campus. And then I also had an entirely different set of people approaching me, asking me, Hey, can I get help with this too? And so I found myself in my own personal time, helping so many women negotiate because they were coming to me with all this pressure, all of these questions. And so I kind of guess fell into this work. And here I am now with Moon Negotiation LLC.
AD :
Well, we’re going to talk more in just a second about the work there at Harvard that you were doing and observations. I just want to one quick step back. I think as I read your bio and look at the work you’ve done, the time you spent teaching in the Bronx stood out to me. I’m married to a former teacher who worked in Atlanta’s inner schools too. And with that risk for you, so I really can identify with that part of your story, can you share a little bit more just about that time and really how it’s shaped maybe your thinking and the approach that you take?
Unconventional Training Grounds For Mastering Influence And Authority [05:34]
JM :
Yeah. In my background, we live in a society where consulting will give me, it offers me a lot of professional capital, but it’s actually the teaching that taught me so much. It was the best informal negotiation training that I could have gotten, right? It’s the best that I could have asked for. So anyone with kids that every conversation can be a negotiation and kids are coming in after recess, they had gotten into an argument, and I’m doing some conflict resolution before we start our next lesson.
And a lot of teaching, and I’m sure you’ve heard stories from your partner about teaching is about a lot of establishing power, especially when you’re a new teacher, but you can’t do it with this brute force. There’s a lot of psychological elements to it. And so I think about a student of mine, let’s call her Sarah. She had a lollipop.
She took it out. She started having some candy in the middle of class, which you’re not allowed to do. And I just walked by. I took it away, put it in the trash, and continued my lesson. Two minutes later, she has another lollipop out. So this is a challenge of authority, and all the other students are watching to see what is Ms. Moon going to do? And you have to make an in the moment decision right there. I could keep on doing this back and forth with her, or how do I nip it in the bud so that we can focus on the math lesson that I was trying to teach?
And so I walked over, I took the lollipop and I scraped it on the bottom of my shoe, and I handed it right back to her. And if we’re talking about New York City, there was hair, there was lint, there were unidentifiable objects on that lollipop. And so you hear the students go, oh, and we had a good chuckle, and she smiled. It was like a defeated smile. It was, okay, I get it. I’m going to stop. And we continued on with our math lesson. Now tell me in what adult setting can you get that type of on the job training?
AD :
What grade level was this?
JM :
This was sixth grade.
AD :
Sixth grade.
JM :
And you know, sixth grade, they’re a tough bunch, but it is developmentally appropriate to sort of push on the boundaries a little bit at that age. So we were having good fun with it.
AD :
Oh, I love it. So I taught at West Point, which as our listeners knows how Nolan and I connected prior to doing that, when I was getting my MBA, when I had a day off from classes, I would substitute teach in the local junior high or high school because I was convinced that if I could handle a junior high student with some of the shenanigans you’re talking about, cadets at West Point would be easy to deal with. And that was true. That was absolutely true. So great OJT.
NM :
So I was hoping you could tell us more about the negotiation coaching clinic and the career negotiation coaching programs. What takeaways or observations did you notice while doing this work?
Unveiling Patterns Of Gender Bias And Empowerment In Negotiation Training [08:25]
JM :
Yeah, yeah. Well, so with both programs, I noticed certain patterns. I noticed certain patterns. So one thing I noticed is that there were, for the coaching clinic, there were a high number of women applicants because they were feeling the need to work on this particular skill. There’s so much pressure on women these days. A lot of it’s self-imposed. A lot of women come to me feeling like I’m afraid to negotiate, but I also don’t want to be taken advantage of.
And we hear these horror stories in the news of people finding out that they’re getting paid a lot less. And so I noticed that there’s a huge demand and a huge desire from women to learn how to negotiate. I also noticed that a lot of people come in thinking that you’re either born a good negotiator or a bad negotiator. They come to me saying, I didn’t think you could learn how to negotiate.
And in this clinic, I realized it’s a skill that you can practice and you can grow. And so it’s in reference to Carol Dweck’s growth mindset, right? Saying that if you practice this, you can learn. And I was really happy to see the outcomes of that. When you give people an opportunity to train, they can quickly see, actually, I can be good at this. I also realized the prevalence of gendered issues throughout the coaching clinic.
So in my check-in meetings with coaches, some of the coaches said, okay, my coachee conceded a lot before we started. Or my coachee was told in the debrief that she came off as aggressive or rude. And if you don’t have some of the sort of background understanding of some of the gender bias that seeps into negotiations, this might just seem like an everyday negotiation issue that anyone might discuss.
But having the background information around biased perceptions of women, the stats on how women tend to negotiate with themselves more or tend to make concessions even before the start of a negotiation, I started to pick up on these patterns. And that could be either, whether it was from managing biased perceptions that other people had of you, or the psychological toll that bias in our society takes on a woman and the way they enter into a negotiation.
So one of the biggest takeaways was the prevalence of the gendered issues and how they seep into everyday negotiations.
AD :
Can we stick with that? And can you just really clarify for our listeners, kind of this evolving landscape of negotiation for women, and specifically the challenges and the biases that you see persisting today?
Insights On Gender Bias And Negotiation From Groundbreaking Research [10:58]
JM :
Yeah, so I actually don’t think that the bias has changed much. I don’t think the landscape itself has changed much. I think the research has evolved to sort of validate what women have already been experiencing and know that they’ve been experiencing. So we can start with talking about Hannah Riley Bowles and her research on salary negotiations. So she did a study, 2005 with men negotiating for their own salary and for other salary. And when they did that, they found that they got similar outcomes.
When women negotiated for their own salary, they got slightly lower outcomes. But when they negotiated on behalf of others, they far outperformed the men in the study. And for me, when I first saw this research, my jaw dropped on the floor. It completely destroys this narrative that women are bad negotiators. So when you dig into the study a little bit more, the research has found that this has a lot to do with how women are expected to be in the service of others.
This stereotype that women are caretakers and they’re taking care of others. So when women negotiate on behalf of themselves, for example, their own salary, they’re violating that stereotype and they’re opening themselves up to negative backlash. When they were negotiating on behalf of others, they weren’t violating that stereotype. So you release them into the wild and they can do so well. So if you think about it, one of the worst insults that we can throw at women in society is calling her selfish. It’s one of the greatest insults you can throw at women today.
And so what women are doing as a result, part of what women do is they’re accurately reading the room. They can tell, I’m going to be punished if I do this, so I’m actually going to take a step back. Maybe I don’t ask for quite as much, right? And this is what leads to women making concessions before they even start to negotiate. I was listening to one of your previous podcast episodes with Lisa Sun, and she was talking about how she hates the phrase, be more confident. And I was listening. I was like, yes, preach. Because that phrase is so problematic. First of all, if I could just be more confident by turning on a light switch, I would’ve done that a long time ago.
And I think it also, it doesn’t unpack the reasons why women don’t feel quite as confident in certain situations. There’s plenty of research that women face bias, that they’re challenged more frequently when they make a statement. They’re challenged more frequently on that statement than a man is. So imagine if a woman is putting her hand out and it gets slapped away every time. Eventually she’s going to learn to stop putting her hand out. In fact, if she continued to put her hand out, we might say She’s being so foolish.
So when women are adapting to the situation and pulling back a little bit, you could say that’s a smart adaptation in the moment. And so I just want to reframe that. I was coming out of a workout class and a guy from the class, Michael, we were taking the train together, so we were doing some small talk, what do you do and what do you, I said, I train women how to negotiate, and this is a very nice, well-intentioned man.
And he said, oh, that’s great, because women really need to be more confident and advocate for themselves. And it’s completely well-intentioned, but it’s misinformed, right? You get where I’m going with that.
AD :
I want to hear how did you respond? I mean, this is a negotiation, right? I mean, educating is negotiation. So how did you respond?
JM :
Absolutely. Unfortunately, I was getting off at the next stop, so I was like, you know what? I do this justice in the 30 seconds that I have, but I will tell you this. What I started to do afterwards is I stopped saying, I train women how to negotiate. I started saying, I train women how to navigate gender bias in negotiation.
So by saying it that way, what I’m doing is there is an assumption there that gender bias exists in negotiation. He might not have known that. That’s the underlying assumption in making that statement and describing the work that I do. To go back to your question about how has the landscape changed, I think the more research is confirming this, right? So 20 years ago, 20 some years ago, when the book Women Don’t Ask or Ask For It came out the book was full of insights, full of so many insights, but a lot of people clung to the description that women are the ones who are not asking.
And so there is this very subtle inherent blame on women for not negotiating, but the more recent research shows women are asking, but they’re still being told no at a higher frequency than with men. So by focusing on women not asking a lot of organizations and leadership, they’re abdicating the responsibility to create more equitable workplaces and to create more equitable processes because they’re putting the onus of responsibility on the individual when all the research shows that this is a systemic issue, not an individual issue.
NM :
Are there particular industries or contexts where you see gender bias being more pronounced in negotiations? And what strategies or techniques do you find particularly effective both for yourself and clients?
The Complex Dynamics Of Perceptions And Realities In Professional Settings [16:35]
JM :
So when we talk about gender bias, I think the perception of how pronounced they are depends on whether it’s explicit bias or implicit bias, right? So let me explain that a little bit more for listeners, right? Let’s say that a woman is a candidate for a job, and she comes in and the interviewer is maybe he’s an older man, he seems kind of old school. He says a little bit of eyebrow raising phrases, and she’s not sure if he’s going to give her a fair shot as opposed to her walking into an interview with someone who she sees is a little bit more, the language that he uses is going to be a little bit more progressive or nuanced.
And so she might see him as someone who is an ally, someone who doesn’t have quite as much bias, but research actually shows that bias is completely separate from good intentions. Any well-meaning person can have bias that they are unaware of. And so some women in these types of situations assume good intentions with one, but with not the other.
And so the way that they interact with the person differs. So what ends up happening is that she gets more negative outcomes with the person that she thought she could trust. And so what I want people to understand, there’s a difference between perceptions of bias and the bias in the moment, how you interact it. You can’t just make the sweeping assumption, oh, they seem well-meaning, so this is probably not going to be an issue for me. You have to be really careful about that.
AD :
Does that matter? So in that scenario, you described if there was a woman at the table, so would that matter towards the outcome?
JM :
That’s a great question. Actually, just to put something on social about this, people think that women cannot commit gender bias against women, and that’s not true, right? People across the entire gender spectrum can be biased against others. And so that’s why in no matter what scenario you’re in, I teach strategies just in case to navigate the gender bias. Don’t assume what’s going on in their heads, and again, it doesn’t matter what their good intentions are. Bias are shortcuts that our brains take. It’s part of our evolution. And so it’s not a conscious thing. It doesn’t mean somebody’s bad.
I know that’s kind of hard to grapple with because there’s been a lot happening the last decade with cancel culture, and people are really afraid to be canceled. They’re afraid to wrestle with some of these very difficult and nuanced topics, but we need to separate intentions from bias. The win-win framing technique is particularly effective for women. Why? Because when women are expected to advocate on behalf of others, the win-win strategy is leaning into that stereotype. I’m not just doing this for myself, I’m also doing it for you. So it is incredibly effective. It sounds simple, and yet I’ve seen it over and over again how we can have so much progress in the negotiation with such a simple framing strategy.
AD :
We’re obviously big proponents of that approach. Want to talk a little bit about organizational aspects. Earlier you talked about the systemic nature of gender bias. As you work with organizational leaders, what are you helping them either realize or understand about creating company cultures that foster environments that are more conducive towards overcoming these biases and breaking barriers?
Shifting Focus from Implicit Bias Training To Structural Changes For Equity [20:19]
JM :
Yeah, I really love that question. So after the George Floyd protests, so many organizational leaders wanted implicit bias trainings because that’s what they heard of. And organizations, whether it was because they realized that they needed to do some more work in this area, or maybe they were just panicking and trying to find a short-term solution to it, a lot of people were leaning into implicit bias trainings, but research shows that they’re not particularly effective.
And I’m a big believer in fixing structures and processes instead of focusing on fixing people. That’s like a personal inner journey that everyone has to do. I focus on, let’s say the example of blind auditions for orchestras, philharmonic orchestras. There was the example of in the seventies and eighties, less than 5% of musicians in an orchestra were women. But when they implemented blind auditions, they put a curtain down. They ended up having more gender parody in the makeup of the orchestra.
And the reason for that is, is that we have this, again, it’s bias, it’s shortcuts that our brain takes. If we have in the past seen these great musicians, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and they’re all men, we associate a talented musician with being a man. And I think about that study all the time, especially when we see the new Silicon Valley genius, because we see a guy in a hoodie playing video games in his office, and we think he must be a genius because we have this association in our brains.
So I think that when we fix these structures to de-bias them, not only are they effective, but they’re also politically palatable. It’s easy to sell different constituents on these particular strategies. I had a client come to me, I’m going to call him David, and he had gotten into an argument with his wife because he had a hiring exercise for his company, and they had two candidates, a man and a woman.
And in this hiring exercise, the man had sort of gone rogue and gotten super creative and sort of colored outside the lines and came back with a really interesting product. And the woman had followed the instructions to a T. And so he was feeling really conflicted about how do I compare these two? And his wife was saying, this is not a fair exercise. And if you look on the surface, if you don’t dig into this a little bit more, you might say, okay, well, she’s not as creative or as entrepreneurial as this man is.
But as we discussed, women tend to get punished more for a lot of actions than men can take without that same backlash. And there’s research that shows when there is ambiguity in a negotiation, women tend to get worse outcomes.
So if we apply that research to other situations, I said to David, I said, there is ambiguity on what these instructions are. Is she allowed to color outside the lines or not? If you want to make it fair, tell both of them, here’s a prompt, but be as creative as you want, and I want to see your final outcome. Or tell them both explicitly follow these instructions to a T and then compare those outcomes. But by being explicit in those instructions, you can now create a level playing field and assess these two candidates solely by the product that they deliver in the end.
AD :
Love so much in your entire response from the research around blind auditions. It’s something I share in class too, the focus on process and structure. This last example you just gave.
NM :
Hey everyone, Nolan here. I have to jump in and end today’s podcast for part A of this show. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to NEGOTIATEx podcast if you haven’t already. And also join us next week for part B of this awesome interview.
