Gender Wage Gap Starts with the Offer

Employers as a group offer lower initial salaries to female job-seekers than to their male competitors, Shiya Wang and Adina Sterling write in Organization Science. After controlling for factors like occupation, worker characteristics, and employer, the researchers found a 5.5 percent gender gap in initial salary offers. Wang and Sterling’s data comes from Payscale, a compensation platform that has collected employment data for more than twenty years. Much of the data is for white-collar professional jobs.

Lower initial offers help explain why, even though women have negotiated their offers more frequently than men for more than 20 years, they are still paid significantly less. In 2024, women working full-time and year-round earned 83 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the US Census.

Work by women is often undervalued when compared to men’s work owing to gender bias. Biases include “Actual work contributions being valued less coming from women than men; assumptions that women's contributions will be less valuable than men's; and lack of recognition or credit for women's contributions,” researchers Ella J. Lombard and Sapna Cheryan write.

People link competence and maleness, another study found (DongWon Oh et al., 2018). Because of these societal stereotypes, Wang and Sterling write that when hiring, “Even if a focal employer does not value the skills and abilities of women and men differently, they might anticipate that other employers do” and adjust their initial offers accordingly.

The news might be even worse for women performing tasks that are considered stereotypically male. Researchers Wang and Sterling found evidence to suggest that “women may receive lower offers than men in occupations with more masculine-typed tasks than in occupations with more feminine-typed tasks.” Men were not similarly disadvantaged when the genders were reversed.

Library of Congress, c. 1909 – 1925.

One practice employers can use to decrease gender bias in pay is to include salary ranges and benefits in job postings. Another is to use metrics to track and compare the initial offers different groups receive. The American Institute for Architects’ Compensation Guide for Equitable Practice is one resource to help employers pay their workers equitably and transparently.

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