Yes . . . and they should! Coming back from the works-in-progress conference this past November at Harvard, one of the most interesting conversations was a late-night one between several professors — men and women — about teaching gender in a negotiation class. Now that the new semester is starting up, I wanted to bring this topic up again.

As others have noted to me, the vast majority of gender and negotiation research, and public presentations on gender, tend to be by women. Debbie Kolb would point out that everyone has gender — not just women — and yet there is clearly something about teaching gender that make at least some male professors uncomfortable. And, don’t get me wrong, it’s not for lack of thinking it’s important; it’s more that they don’t want to be patronizing or make the situation worse by raising stereotypes that they themselves do not believe in. At least one male professor hoped that by avoiding teaching gender, and teaching general negotiation effectiveness, everyone would get the message that people should not be defined by their gender. But, as he noted, that does not, in the end, necessarily serve either the male or female students in our negotiation classes.