Women in International Negotiations: Evidence from the Council of the European Union

What is the impact of increasing women’s participation in international negotiations? Although a growing international relations scholarship is examining the role of women leaders on interstate conflict and crisis bargaining, we know less about the wider dynamics of women getting a seat in the rooms where the terms of international cooperation are negotiated. Long-standing assumptions hold that women are more peaceful and cooperative than men. However, it has also been suggested that women who have made it to the relevant top offices are likely unrepresentative, and have to adjust their behavior to meet expectations. Leveraging text-as-data from the negotiations at the Council of the EU in 2011-2016, combined with novel data on the gender of speakers in over 3,500 negotiation statements, we investigate whether women employ systematically different negotiation rhetoric than men. Do women deploy more cooperative language or make harder demands than men? Building on existing work on international relations, psychology, and business studies, we investigate empirically the individual-level sources of negotiation strategies, as well as their likely impact on international cooperation.