Women in international negotiations: evidence from the Council of the European Union

Can individuals make a difference to international negotiations? Individuals in negotiations face different structural pressures depending on their visible identity characteristics. This is especially true for women, who simultaneously face gendered stereotypes about appropriate behavior, but also underestimation of their professional competence because of their historical under-representation internationally. We theorize that women negotiators have incentives to adjust their negotiation strategies to navigate such structural pressures: when career pressures dominate, women prioritize strategies that demonstrate their toughness as negotiators and professional skills. But when short- term pressures to achieve support for their proposals dominates, they instead adopt more gender-stereotypically congruent negotiation rhetoric to appear diplomatic and likable. Leveraging novel data on the identities of 700 negotiators and 3,500 negotiation statements at the Council of the European Union in 2011-2016 and large language models (LLMs), we uncover gender differences in negotiator tendency to indicate flexibility and willingness to compromise. Women tend to use less flexible strategies, especially when the gender composition in the negotiation does not require confirming to gendered expectations. In addition to providing a unique insight into real international negotiations, our findings contribute to the understanding of how individuals navigate contradicting structural pressures in international organizations, and how improving representation of underrepresented groups influences world politics.