How Negotiation Skills Empower Girls

Can teaching teenage girls how to negotiate help them stay in school, marry later, and form more equal relationships? The answer appears to be yes — and those gains add up to strong economic returns for each dollar of public spending.

In 2013, Wharton business economics and public policy professor Corinne Low and her co-authors introduced a negotiation skills course for eighth-grade girls in low-income areas of Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. A decade on, those who took part had stayed in school longer, delayed sex and marriage, wed partners closer to their own age, and held less traditional views about gender roles.

The findings are reported in a new paper forthcoming in the American Economic Review: Insights, co-authored by Low alongside Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, and Xiaoyue Shan.

Each girl gained about 0.23 more years of schooling, with gains that generate significant economic value over time. As it is too early to see the impact on their earnings, the authors estimated the payoff using evidence from a study linking education to later-life outcomes in Ghana: about $6.60 in benefits for every dollar spent.

“The key thing that was unique about our negotiation curriculum is that it aimed to give agency to girls in a position of disempowerment,” Low said. “The problem with many traditional empowerment programs is that they presume girls have a power to change their own lives that doesn’t actually exist.”

Previous research shows that financial support can help girls stay in school, but such programs are costly.

By contrast, the negotiation course in Lusaka tested a different idea: that girls may leave school early not just because of money, but because of pressures in their relationships, including with their family. These can lead to cutting education short as well as early marriage and pregnancy.

“The problem with many traditional empowerment programs is that they presume girls have a power to change their own lives that doesn’t actually exist.”— Corinne Low

The Value of Training Negotiation Skills

The six-session course was developed by Low in collaboration with other researchers, who realized that MBA and law students pay thousands of dollars for negotiation training, but the same resource was not available in settings where it could make a large impact. The training taught girls how to understand their own interests, recognize others’ incentives, find common ground and, if needed, walk away from harmful situations. The aim was to give girls the tools to stand up for themselves while building strong relationships — what the researchers call “relational empowerment.”

To test whether it was the negotiation lessons that made the difference on outcomes, the researchers split roughly 2,400 girls into three groups: one received negotiation training, one took part in a group program without the negotiation lessons, and one received no intervention.

The findings showed that girls who received the negotiation training were 6.2 percentage points less likely to begin sexual activity before age 19, and 3.2 percentage points less likely to marry before age 23. They were also 34% less likely to marry a man at least five years older, an age gap that is linked to a higher risk of HIV.

Low said the training was specifically in contrast to a traditional empowerment approach of trying to inspire girls or goal-set in a way girls may not be able to achieve given their circumstances. “The difference with our program is that we took as a given that for these girls, their futures depended on other people,” Low said. “To be truly empowered, it meant needing to understand those relationships and use them to create better outcomes.”

A decade later, girls who took the course were also less likely to hold traditional views about women’s roles; for example, they were less likely to say that a good wife should obey her husband even if she disagrees with him.

The “placebo” program — which offered support but no negotiation training — had little impact on marriage, sexual behavior, or gender attitudes. The difference suggests it was the negotiation skills themselves that drove the broader changes.

“Ten years later, the proof is in the pudding — and in the college degrees.”— Corinne Low

A Critical Window for Education

The authors argue that adolescence may be a “critical window,” when learning to stand up for oneself can shape later outcomes, including schooling and marriage.

“We saw all of that in the initial study, which followed the girls up to 11th grade,” Low said. “But when we went back, we saw it was also making a difference in completing college education. By their early twenties, the program had delayed marriage and childbearing, and led to women marrying partners closer to their own age, all indicative of greater agency.”

For policymakers, the standout finding is that a short, low-cost program produced lasting gains. By one economic measure, the negotiation classes generated about $9 of value for every $1 of public spending, placing them above most programs evaluated using the same yardstick.

That success has already driven wider adoption. “We’ve now seen this program scaled up all over the world,” Low said. “The Zambian government has incorporated it into their life skills curriculum. But we’d like to see it reach secondary school girls across sub-Saharan Africa.”

“Ten years later, the proof is in the pudding — and in the college degrees,” she added.