It is 2 am, Charlene Barshefsky tells us, in the late stages of the U.S./China trade negotiations, and she has been listening to her “very angry” Chinese counterpart—when this much larger man suddenly lunges across the table toward her, pounds his fist, and demands, “Take it or leave it!” The critical moment here, we suggest, encompasses not only “the lunge,” his fist, and his demand, but Barshefsky’s extraordinary response: she appears calm and remains silent for some time, and watching him carefully, she regains composure and then deftly helps her antagonist to save face so she can pursue her own advantage. To appreciate and do justice to her moves in these couple minutes, we must explore their backstory.
Our wonder, “How did Charlene Barshefsky actually do that?” soon led us to wonder what could have prepared her to act in this way. And that led us to this public secret: surely many American women have spent their entire lives dancing around male violence—in their homes, schools, workplaces, and in television and film performances not least of all—in ways that many men have not. We live neither in a post‐racial nor post‐sexist world, and we suspect that Barshefsky’s acculturation as a white, middle‐class American woman in a male‐dominant society might well have better enabled her response than any negotiation “training” ever had.
If Barshefsky’s generation struggled no longer to just “make nice”; no longer to remain deferentially silent while the men talked; no longer to cook for, serve, humor, tolerate, and excuse traditionally dominant male behaviors, that generation also had learned survival skills along the way. From childhood through adolescence and on into adulthood, women have had to learn not only to deflect and sidestep threats of male aggression; they have had to learn much more. When men have acted out, women have had to respond too often, in the moment, to normalize relationships as if no “brick had been dropped,” as if no insult, slander, abuse, or betrayal of norms had occurred, as if nothing important had taken place or called for immediate attention. What Barshefsky does in this case seems both brilliant in the circumstance and all too resonant with the gendered politics of growing up in the United States in the mid‐to‐late twentieth century.
Not only does the smaller Barshefsky not respond to the physicality of her counterpart's lunge and to his table‐pounding, neither does she respond to his literal demand by taking the bait, “Take it or leave it!” and then arguing her case. Instead, as if stepping aside from the drink or the plate knocked over in a busy restaurant, she addresses not just the options at hand but also the person at hand. She treats his intemperate lunge as a momentary indiscretion, one covered up poorly by a fig leaf of a rhetorical threat that she knows not to take literally. So she takes his impassioned demand as an urging that instead asks her “to really think about this proposal,” to “take it seriously, as it deserves,” and so she soothes another male ego, even apparently respects it, if only for strategic purposes.
Barshefsky does not meet the oncoming train head on; she steps aside and lets it go by. In the time she takes to compose herself, she has let her counterpart witness her nonresponse—not just as her inaction but as, all too obviously, her immediate refusal to “take it or leave it” or to be bullied and deferential. Barshefsky’s composure was both trained and active; she knew that if she spoke more quickly, her voice might have shaken, signaling her vulnerability, so she decided—acted carefully—to disclose through a longer silence her refusal to do as told. In apparently doing nothing for thirty to forty seconds, she showed that she was not hooked, not compelled, not persuaded, and not impressed with her counterpart’s exasperated move. And more: she saw that he knew that—and that he wasn’t leaving.
Since the Chinese negotiator was clearly not leaving, Barshefsky knew that his “Take it or leave it” was a bluff and that he had miscalculated. He was not ready to end the relationship after all—and that meant he was vulnerable. If he needed to continue, needed to be there, both her power and his dependency grew, so she could maintain the relationship and in the morning continue to advance her interests. But to continue the relationship, she worked to help him save face, to go on as if he had not just spilled all the drinks at the table.
But if he did not really mean, “Take it or leave it,” what did he mean? Barshefsky uses the emotion of the moment to defuse the literal demand, to treat it as a request to be taken seriously. She reframes the bad behavior, the norm‐breaking excess, the mess at hand, by playing out the gendered “break up” conversation: I can see that you feel very strongly about this. I need to take this very seriously, and I take you very seriously—and so let us cool off and keep talking, continue this conversation and relationship in the morning. Then we can come back to working on the matters that concern us so much—the matters that prevent you from leaving right now.
Barshefsky demonstrates negotiating skills that women of all ages in patriarchal cultures have learned, for better or worse, for decades as they have both suffered and protected male egos and endured aggressive demands, male tempers, male acting out with more heat than light. Women in male‐dominant settings have long learned the value of not always responding to male excess. Nonetheless, keeping a Barshefskyan composure has called for unspeakably hard work, difficult choices, life‐saving strategies, and skill in wielding power, however partial it may be.
Can any of this be taught? Barshefsky’s improvisation drew both upon her skillful attention in the moment—the other’s subsequently apprehensive eyes and posture being no less revealing than his abrupt lunge—and her long experience and “practice” with gendered hierarchies in the United States. We suspect that other women or men more predisposed to tit‐for‐tat escalation would have “unlearning” to do before being remotely able to do what Barshefsky did here. This was no mere deference but an active reading of power; this was a bluff, she saw, so she followed up to her advantage. Can negotiators be trained to exercise such keen judgment in the face of complexity and aggression? Probably no more than competitors in football, basketball, and jujitsu—or surgeons, or crisis counselors—can be prepared, instructed, and coached effectively, but, just as probably, no less.
