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Essays on Gender Wage Gap

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The Impact of Gender on Income Inequality

The need for eliminating the gender wage gap to improve society, the reasons for the disparity in wages between men and women, gender wage gap issue: equal pay for equal work, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Impact of Experience and Education on Womens Wages

A study of the different aspects of gender gap in society, a history of the issue of the gender wage gap in america, the causes, consequences and solutions of income inequality, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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Gender Pay Discrimination in The Us Soccer

The issue of pay gap in the women's u.s. soccer team, result of the feminization of poverty, gender pay gaps on the example soccer`s team, a study of gender inequality in hong kong: review of literature, the effects of gender inequality on society and the economy, the legal dilemma behind equal pay for equal work in india, reflection of gender inequality in different spheres, gender discrimination in the workplace: challenges and solutions.

The gender pay gap or gender wage gap is the average difference between the remuneration for men and women who are working. Women are generally considered to be paid less than men.

Differences in pay are caused by occupational segregation (with more men in higher paid industries and women in lower paid industries), vertical segregation (fewer women in senior, and hence better paying positions), ineffective equal pay legislation, women's overall paid working hours, and barriers to entry into the labor market (such as education level and single parenting rate).

The gender pay gap can be a problem from a public policy perspective because it reduces economic output and means that women are more likely to be dependent upon welfare payments, especially in old age.

The pay gap exists in nearly every profession. Mothers face an even wider pay gap than women without kids. Women with bachelor’s degrees working full time are paid 26% less than their male counterparts. Women face an income gap in retirement.

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• Gender Equality
• Gender Inequality
• Women's Rights
• Freedom of Speech
• Discrimination
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• Me Too Movement

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Gender Pay Gap - Free Essay Samples And Topic Ideas

The Gender Pay Gap refers to the relative difference in the average earnings of men and women within the workforce. Essays on this topic could explore the historical evolution of the gender pay gap, its current status across different countries or sectors, and the societal and economic factors contributing to it. Moreover, discussions could extend to the impact of the gender pay gap on economic inequality and suggestions for policies and practices to alleviate the gap and promote gender equality in the workplace. We have collected a large number of free essay examples about Gender Pay Gap you can find in Papersowl database. You can use our samples for inspiration to write your own essay, research paper, or just to explore a new topic for yourself.

The Gender Pay Gap Situation

Despite numerous feminist movements and policies put in place to promote gender inequality, women still do not get paid as much as men. The gender pay gap is the difference between what the average man and woman makes. Wade (2018) found that full time working women make $0.82 for every dollar that a full time working man makes. The gap has slowly gotten smaller since women were first allowed to work, however, it still persists. According to the Institute for […]

Americanah: Gender Pay Gap in Nigeria and North America

In the book Americanah by Chimamanda Adichie, women's earning potentials are vividly shown based on experiences that Ifemelu and her Aunty Uju have in both Nigeria and North America. These earning potentials affect gender roles and expectations in Nigeria and North America because women are expected more to be the house keepers and mothers rather than ever having a job themselves. Nowadays it is much different as the feminist movement continues to grow across the world. This is presented throughout […]

Gender Wage Gap and Gender Equality

Although men and women have made great strides for gender equality in recent years, the economic pay gap between men and women still persists. The Gender Wage Gap refers to the general gap between what similarly qualified men and women are paid for the same job. It is most commonly measured in the median annual pay of all women who work full time compared to a similar group of men. However, whichever way it is measured, the gender pay gap […]

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The Gender Pay Gap in Sport

The gender pay gap, within the United States, is an issue across all places of work and negatively impacts the lives of all women, but the question comes into play in the sports industry. A place where women are encouraged to participate in the same activity as the male competition yet prevented from excelling due to the overbearing male presence. This multi-billion dollar industry is giving the majority of its money to the male athletes and has been since the […]

The Gender Pay Gap

Living in the year 2019 and you would think that after centuries of women being oppressed, there would be some sort of change, a progression that is long overdue. However, the wage gap between men and women is still an ongoing issue that will not be acquired for another hundred years to come. With that in mind, the state of the gender pay gap in America is explained, along with the wage gap in various occupations, and the structural barriers […]

Why do Women Deserve to be Paid Equally?

In the age of freedom, this is a harsh reality that we are still facing the unequal pay gap in United States. Women are the only bread earners in many American families. Despite their equal work hours, they are paid unequal as compared to their male coworkers. The United States is the largest economy in the world, yet we are struggling for equal income for women. In the age where we are taking stand for LGBTQ’s rights, we must be […]

Gender Pay Gap is a Myth

There have been ongoing arguments about the gender way gap and what are the factors to it. Many assume that it has a lot to do with race or ethnicity and this is not the case at all. Gender wage pay has nothing to do with race or ethnicity because when looking at the graphs from the article “ The Gender Wage Gap: 2017 Earning differences by Race and Ethnicity” from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research it has been […]

The Gender Pay Gap and the Equality

Introduction The gender pay gap and the equality of pay rates have always been topics of discussion in today’s society. Equal pay means that individuals accomplishing the same work should be compensated equivalently in regards to completion. Issues are raised between the earning differences between men and women due to the lack of equal pay between the two genders. By referring back to U.S. history on the subject, we found that the issue dates back over 100 years ago and […]

The Gender Gap in Political Ambition

The gender gap in political ambition has been a topic extensively researched by political analysts and professors for years. The focus of this essay will be to examine why this gender gap exists and how it directly affects the underrepresentation of women who hold public office in the United States. This essay will explore the ways in which young women are politically socialized and factors in early childhood through high school which affect one’s political motivations. This research also seeks […]

What is the Gender Pay Gap

Women have suffered greatly in their bid to be considered equals and this has been from the basic right to exist, vote and to lead companies. Cultures and societies have played a role in how stigmatized the opposite sexes are. Even today, we see many who claim that weaknesses in women prevent them from leading or doing the same work and hence why should they get paid equally. Case and point are the Billie Jean King vs Bobby Riggs, in […]

The Gender Pay Gap Women Face

Income by gender, women in the labor market system versus men.The gender pay gap women face is a result of inequality based on gender, resulting in lower income. An independent variable impacts the dependent variable. As a result, an individuals gender- the independent variable-impacts income-dependent variable. The gender pay gap is an issue and it’s real. Nowadays, being a female in the current U.S culture means that the income I receive will be less than a mans. This culture has shaped […]

Sexism in Shakespeare’s Play Othello

"In the book, Othello written by Shakespeare, there is a main theme of sexism present throughout the book, Although the book was written in the 1600s, and there have been great decreases in sexism around the world, many of these ideas and scenarios are still present to this day. Sexism is defined as prejudice, stereotyping, or discrimination, typically against women, on the basis of sex. Sexism has been present for centuries, in many different forms, such as wage gaps, gender […]

Gender Pay Gap Situation in Bangladesh

Introduction: The difference between the average gross earnings of female and male employees is known as the 'gender pay gap'. ("Gender Equality: Gender Pay Gap", 2019) Most commonly, it refers to the median annual pay of all women who work full time and year-round, compared to the pay of a similar cohort of men. Other estimates of the gender pay gap are based on weekly or hourly earnings, or are specific to a particular group of women. (Vagins, 2019) In […]

The Right to Equality

Imagine a community or city where everyone is treated equally and no one is discriminated against. Everyone in this world deserves to be treated as an equal and nothing less. Equality is the absence of legal discrimination against any one individual, group, class, gender or race. Till this day many races, groups and class are being discriminated. Race and ethnicity is one of the biggest things that cause people to discriminate against others.The global community is not doing enough to […]

Should Everyone Attend College?

For decades there has been an ongoing debate on whether or not everyone should attend College, and if it’ll be beneficial for their overall gross income. On one hand, it is argued that College is a crucial essential path that should indeed be completed in order to reach a designated level of success. While on the other hand, others maintain the belief that it is possible to earn a sufficient income without a College degree. I, however, do believe that […]

Essay about Gender Wage Gap Analysis

Men and women are both capable of successfully occupying the same positions or jobs. Both genders are capable of attaining the same education, working at the same firm, and moving up the ladder while being productive in their occupation. Even though men and women are equal in theses aspects, the wages they are being paid do not show that equality. Men make more than women in the same occupations. This is a significant issue as it allows discrimination to continue […]

Men and Women in the Workplace

The gender wage gap in the economy, as a whole, is defined by “the relative earnings difference between men and women. His female counterparty makes about seventy-seven cents for every dollar a man makes.” Even if a man and a woman have the same background in education and work history, the man will go home with a paycheck higher than the woman. In society, there is a gender wage gap that cannot be remedied by increasing education alone. Inequality results […]

Looking Beyond the Numbers

Mathematicians, scientists, doctors, and countless other professions validate theories by producing a factor that is then analyzed for accuracy. Similarly, in 2019, economists analyzed median income data in the United States and determined what is the most commonly used figure to measure the economic phenomena of gender pay gap, 80.5%. Compared to Estonia at 25.3%, this figure, 80.5%, is frequently misinterpreted as an economic achievement for America. Although most states have implemented laws against gender discrimination and the 1964 Civil […]

Pay Gap by Gender and Race in Seattle WA

Seattle is deeply unsettled the past ten years once a national study unconcealed that the railway line space has one among the biggest genders pay gaps within the country. the foremost goal of this text is to know the sources of the convergence in men’s and women’s earnings within the public and personal sectors similarly because the stagnation of this trend in the new millennium. For this purpose, we tend to delineate temporal changes within the role vie by major […]

A Problem of Social Justice in World

Multiple people are discriminated for their race, their religion, or their sexuality. The idea of entitlement has been an issue in the United States for centuries. Even before the United States became a country in 1776, racial prejudice existed. At first it was the Native Americans' who were looked down on and forced to do the new white settlers dirty work. Then it became African Americans. Whites have been seen to be superior to African Americans for many years, more […]

Women and Men Pay Gap

Imagine you have been working the same job for years, but you learn that your paycheck is less than your co-workers that do the same job as you. Wouldn't that would make you upset? Well, that is what much of women experience with their male co-workers. This is the gender pay gap, and it is sexist. Because the gender pay gap is sexist, the government should put more laws in place for employers, so they pay each gender the same […]

Gender Discrimination in Hollywood

The gender pay gap is also one of the major issues that contribute to discrimination in the industry. This has been a long-standing issue in Hollywood, despite the progression of women right and equality. In the article "The Gender Wage Gap: Cause, Consequences, and Remedies," Yaveline Aly explains some of the major elements that lead to the discrimination between male and female pay gap. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act banished the sperate pay between men and women in the […]

Pink Capitalism for LGBTQ Community

Pink Capitalism, plainly, is the incorporation of the LGBTQ movement and sexual diversity to capitalism and the market economy. It is a targeted inclusion of the LGBTQ community to generate a market focused specifically on them. And even though pride parades sweep away the world and legal turnarounds change our perspectives, it’s hard to deny that discrimination against the LGBTQ community exists, especially in the workplace. Pride parades are about celebrating diversity and inclusion. And while we do celebrate the […]

Hunger Games and in Real Life

The novel The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins presents themes that are real even in today's society such as inequality. The themes make what would qualify for good writing research topic proposal. This paper presents my writing research topic proposal based on the social issues presented in The Hunger Games. My general/broad topic focusses on inequality The subtopics directly related to the broad topic include income inequality between men and women in the United States, the effects of political inequality […]

Equal Pay Act Analysis

This is a plea to action. The gender wage gap is silent but on going debate. Employees are told to not discuss pay and salary by threat of job security, the threat keeps everyone silent so the pay differnce isn't seen or noticed. In 1963, the Equal Pay Act was introudced. It promised to close the wage gap by essentislly making gender discrimination in wages illegal. For the past 50 years, in the presence of The Equal Pay Act , […]

Education and Women’s Right

In Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”, she covers a broad range of topics in each chapter concerning the equality of women compared to men. To be clear, Wollstonecraft is not indicating that male and female are made mentally and physically the same but wants her readers to understand that both are equal when it comes to acquiring an education and their position in the workplace. This is a point that she debated with opposing theorists’ […]

Equal Rights Ammendment

A potential constitutional reform is to implement the Equal Rights Amendment. If the constitution implemented the Equal Rights Amendment, inequality based on gender would be deemed unconstitutional. The idea of the equal rights amendment is not new and has been thought about for years, but has still not been passed. The Equal Rights Amendment was introduced by Alice Paul in 1923, and many supporters fought for the amendment to be implemented through protests and acts of civil disobedience from 1972 […]

Radical Feminism: when People Go too Far

"Feminism, according to The Merriam Webster Dictionary is, “The theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes” (Merriam Webster Dictionary). It is a noble cause that the majority of people agree with. Sadly, in the present, feminism has a radical group of women convinced that they are oppressed in today's society and demand to be treated above men. It is clear that this group no longer want the equality of the sexes, but rather they desire the […]

France: New Gender Equality Obligations Established

Article Summary In this article, Marion Le Roux and Ji Eun Kaela Kim clarify a set of new obligations that are enforced on employers that aim to promote professional equality between men and women in the workplace. Le Roux and Kim (2019) raise the argument that there are about one-fourth of pay gaps between men and women employees, and they also add that numerous female employees also undergo further kinds of disparate treatment at the workplace (Le Roux and Kim, […]

Sexism in the Workplace Among Minority Women

Women make up less than a quarter of the system. The leadership gap is universal; gender gaps across industries in the U.S have the biggest leadership gap ever found in staffing. This is proven because there is a 15% gap versus leadership representation. Women, specifically, face unequal treatment and pay in comparison to men. The treatment and job positions in the workplace should not be influenced by gender. Gender Is an identification that determines what role an individual will have […]

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It's Equal Pay Day. The gender pay gap has hardly budged in 20 years. What gives?

Stacey Vanek Smith

Women earn about 82 cents for every dollar men make, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. That means on March 14, women's pay catches up to what men made in 2022. Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images hide caption

Women earn about 82 cents for every dollar men make, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. That means on March 14, women's pay catches up to what men made in 2022.

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day: March 14th represents how far into the year women have had to work to catch up to what their male colleagues earned the previous year.

In other words, women have to work nearly 15 months to earn what men make in 12 months.

82 cents on the dollar, and less for women of color

This is usually referred to as the gender pay gap. Here are the numbers: - Women earn about 82 cents for every dollar a man earns - For Black women, it's about 65 cents - For Latina women, it's about 60 cents

Those gaps widen when comparing what women of color earn to the salaries of White men . These numbers have basically not budged in 20 years . That's particularly strange because so many other things have changed:

- More women now graduate from college than men - More women graduate from law school than men - Medical school graduates are roughly half women

That should be seen as progress. So why hasn't the pay gap improved too?

On Equal Pay Day, women are trying to make a dollar out of 83 cents

Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell who has been studying the gender pay gap for decades, calls this the $64,000 question. "Although if you adjust for inflation, it's probably in the millions by now," she jokes.

The Indicator from Planet Money

Women, career and family: a conversation with claudia goldin, the childcare conundrum.

Blau says one of the biggest factors here is childcare. Many women shy away from really demanding positions or work only part time because they need time and flexibility to care for their kids . "Women will choose jobs or switch to occupations or companies that are more family friendly," she explains. "But a lot of times those jobs will pay less." Other women leave the workforce entirely. For every woman at a senior management level who gets promoted, two women leave their jobs , most citing childcare as a major reason.

The "unexplained pay gap"

Even if you account for things like women taking more flexible jobs, working fewer hours, taking time off for childcare, etc., paychecks between the sexes still aren't square. Blau and her research partner Lawrence Kahn controlled for "everything we could find reliable data on" and found that women still earn about 8% less than their male colleagues for the same job .

"It's what we call the 'unexplained pay gap,'" says Blau, then laughs. "Or, you could just call it discrimination."

Planet Money

Mind the pay gap, mend the gap.

One way women could narrow the unexplained pay gap is, of course, to negotiate for higher salaries. But Blau points out that women are likely to experience backlash when they ask for more money. And it can be hard to know how much their male colleagues make and, therefore, what to ask for.

That is changing: a handful of states now require salary ranges be included in job postings.

The big reveal: New laws require companies to disclose pay ranges on job postings.

Blau says that information can be a game changer at work for women and other marginalized groups: "They can get a real sense of, 'Oh, this is the bottom of the range and this is the top of the range. What's reasonable to ask for?'"

A pay raise, if the data is any indication.

Where there's gender equality, people tend to live longer

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Expert Commentary

Pay gap between men and women: What the research says

Research shows that the pay gap in the U.S. narrowed in the 1980s and 1990s as women gained work and educational experience, but the gap persists today and has not changed much in recent years.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Clark Merrefield, The Journalist's Resource January 24, 2020

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/economics/pay-gap/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, the  Journalist’s Resource team is combing through the Democratic presidential candidates’ platforms and reporting what the research says about their policy proposals. We want to encourage deep coverage of these proposals — and do our part to help deter  horse race journalism , which research suggests can lead to inaccurate reporting and an uninformed electorate. We’re focusing on proposals that have a reasonable chance of becoming policy. For us, that means at least 3 of the 5 top-polling candidates say they intend to tackle the issue. Here, we look at what the research says about the pay gap between men and women.

Candidates favoring legislation or using executive authority to try to close the pay gap

Michael Bennet *, Pete Buttigieg *, John Delaney *, Tulsi Gabbard *, Deval Patrick *, Bernie Sanders *, Tom Steyer ,* Elizabeth Warren *, Andrew Yang *

What the research says

Women working full-time in the U.S. made a median of $821 each week in 2019, compared with a weekly median of $1,007 for men — that’s about 81 cents women earned for every dollar men earned — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics . The pay gap between men and women refers to that 19-cent-per-dollar discrepancy. Research shows that the pay gap narrowed in the 1980s and 1990s as women gained work and educational experience, but the gap persists today and has not changed much in recent years.

Key context

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 provides federal protection so that men and women receive “equal pay for equal work,” according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency that enforces workplace laws. Work tasks must be similar but they don’t have to be identical to be considered legally “equal.” Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 more broadly outlaws workplace discrimination on the basis of sex, including pay discrimination.

“Gender wage gap” is the phrase politicians, academics and journalists sometimes use to describe the per-dollar difference between what men and women earn. Courts haven’t settled if federal law also covers people on the basis of gender identity and sexual orientation, or if protections are limited to biological sex alone. This is the difference between sex and gender identity, according to the National Institutes of Health :

Sex is biological. It’s based on your genetic makeup. Males have one X and one Y chromosome in every cell of the body. Females have two X chromosomes in every cell. These cells make up all your tissues and organs, including your skin, heart, stomach, muscles, and brain. Gender is a social or cultural concept. It refers to the roles, behaviors, and identities that society assigns to girls and boys, women and men, and gender-diverse people. Gender is determined by how we see ourselves and each other, and how we act and interact with others.

Whether Title VII extends beyond a biological interpretation of “sex” will be clarified when the Supreme Court decides R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission . The case centers on a funeral home that fired a transgender employee after she began living as a woman in 2013. The justices heard arguments in October 2019, but there’s no timeframe for when they’ll issue an opinion .

Elizabeth Warren is one candidate still in the race who has proposed an in-depth pay gap policy that specifically addresses the pay gap for black women. Black women make about 68 cents for every dollar a white man makes, according to the 2019 BLS numbers.

Joe Biden has released a broad plan that aims to ensure “women of all ages have a fair chance to earn a good living” and mentions that the “Obama-Biden Administration fought for equal pay for women,” but doesn’t offer specifics related to closing the pay gap.

Pay transparency — making pay rates public — is something candidates sometimes talk about as a solution to narrow the pay gap. In Canada, faculty salaries above a certain level at public universities were made public by law starting in the mid-1990s. Researchers writing in a November 2019 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper find “robust evidence that the laws reduced the gender pay gap between men and women by approximately 30%.”

“One effect of the provision of information on gender-based salary disparities within an organization is that it may lead individuals to privately demand higher pay from their employer,” the authors write.

Another NBER working paper , from January 2018, finds that after private-sector pay transparency legislation passed in 2006 in Denmark, the gender pay gap there declined by 7% over the following two years.

When it comes to the size of the median hourly wage gap, the U.S. ranks among the worst of 30 high-income countries — better than Finland, the United Kingdom, Estonia and the Republic of Korea, but worse than Spain, Australia, France, Italy and others — according to the 2018-2019 Global Wage Report from the United Nations’ International Labour Organization .

Formative findings

Researchers largely agree that the pay gap between men and women narrowed most in the 1980s and 1990s and has leveled since the early 2000s. The closing gap in the 1980s was driven by women improving their qualifications, gaining work experience and moving into professional and managerial roles, according to a 2001 analysis from Cornell University labor economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn .

By 2010, factors like education and work experience explained little of the persistent gap, according to a 2017 paper by Blau and Kahn in the Journal of Economic Literature . The gap for top-paying jobs, like executive-level positions or slots at major law firms, has closed more slowly than for jobs at middle and lower pay tiers. Workforce interruptions and women working fewer hours than men are to blame for the gap that remains at the top, the authors find when reviewing the literature.

“Considerable empirical evidence indicates a negative relationship between children and women’s wages, commonly known as the motherhood wage penalty,” the authors write.

Recent data on full-time wage and salary workers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show a wide range of pay gaps by occupation. Chief executives, surgeons and financial advisors are among the occupations with the biggest pay gaps between men and women. Occupations in which women make more per dollar than men include fast food servers , paralegals, editors and receptionists.

A Pew Research report , published January 30, 2020, finds more women than men working in certain high-skill, higher-paying jobs, based on 2018 data — a trend that may have contributed to the overall gap being smaller today than 40 years ago. Women are now more likely than men to hold jobs that require strong social skills, like sales managers, and also occupations that require critical thinking and writing skills, like teaching, according to the report.

Though the overall pay gap is much smaller than it used to be, the fact remains that federal legislation, like the EPA and Title VII, has allowed redress through the courts but hasn’t eliminated the gap. The most recent federal legislation linked to equal pay is the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 , the first law Barack Obama signed as president.

Ledbetter worked as a shift supervisor at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company through the 1980s and most of the 1990s. She sued Goodyear in 1998 after she discovered she was making less than her male counterparts. The Supreme Court threw out her case because, according to Title VII at the time, plaintiffs had to file suit within 180 days of the first act of discrimination. The act named for her amends Title VII and re-starts that 180-day countdown each time there is a discriminatory pay action — like each time an employee receives a paycheck.

Though the act makes it possible for someone like Ledbetter — who found out about pay inequality well after the initial fact — to file suit, the act hasn’t led to a huge increase in claims of pay discrimination because of sex with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, according to a 2017 paper in Advancing Women in Leadership .

Recent research

There are 24 states with equal pay laws that “differ in some material way” from the EPA, according to University of Florida law professor Stephanie Bornstein , writing in 2018 in the Maryland Law Review .

“Three states in particular, California, Massachusetts, and Oregon, have succeeded in enacting the most far-reaching legislation to date that promises to offer new solutions to remedy both gender and racial pay gaps,” Bornstein writes.

Laws in those three states aren’t identical, but each protects more classes of people from pay discrimination than the EPA does. California in particular has a long track record of attempting to address equal pay discrepancies. The state passed its first equal pay act in 1949 — 14 years before the federal equal pay law — and strengthened statewide protections in 2015 .

In September 2018, California passed a law mandating representation from women on corporate boards. By the end of 2019, public companies based in the state had to have at least one female director, with more female directors required by 2021, depending on the size of the board. California is the first state to set such quotas. Women hold 20% of board seats among the 3,000 most valuable publicly traded companies in the U.S., according to executive data collection and analysis firm Equilar.

Research indicates that having more women in top management positions can help close the pay gap and improve company performance. An October 2007 analysis in the American Sociological Review suggests that “the presence of high-status female managers has a much larger impact on gender wage inequality” than promoting women to lower-level managerial positions.

“This finding highlights — in a new way — the significance of the ‘glass ceiling,’” the authors write. “If our findings hold, not only are qualified women blocked from upper-level managerial positions and denied the benefits of those jobs, but their absence has ripple effects that shape workplace outcomes for non-managerial women as well.”

Another analysis , from January 2012 in the Strategic Management Journal , takes 15 years of data from top managers at U.S. firms listed on the S&P 1500 stock market and finds that “a given firm generates on average 1% (or over $40 million) more economic value with at least one woman on its top management team than without any women on its top management team and also enjoys superior accounting performance.”

Corporate board quotas by gender may, however, lead to short-term losses. Firms affected by a board quota that went into effect in Norway in 2006 “undertake fewer workforce reductions than comparison firms, increasing relative labor costs and employment levels and reducing short-term profits,” finds a July 2013 paper in the American Economic Journal .

Similarly, a January 2019 research paper from the Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill finds short-term losses in stock value for companies headquartered in California when the state’s board quota law was signed. The authors tie short-term losses particularly to companies that don’t have access to a “local pool of female directors.” In other words, the search for women directors would be more costly and time consuming for those companies.

“We acknowledge, however, that these policies may have positive long-term effects on women’s labor market outcomes, may enhance fairness and equity in the workplace, and ultimately may lead to improved outcomes for firms’ stakeholders,” the authors write.

Closing the remaining pay gap between men and women may come down to shifts in workplace and cultural values — not just how long people work, but when during the day work is done. Harvard University economist Claudia Goldin offers this perspective in the American Economic Review :

The solution does not (necessarily) have to involve government intervention and it need not make men more responsible in the home (although that wouldn’t hurt). But it must involve changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility. The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours.

Labor law experts Gary Siniscalco , Lauri Damrell and Clara Morain Nabity put equal weight on the need for legislation and the need for society writ large to recognize underlying cultural reasons for the persistent pay gap.

For example, they offer that women working in different industries may value their time and interests outside of work differently. Divergent pay between men and women, in some cases, may come down to personal choice, like the decision to start a family or not.

The authors explain, writing in the American Bar Association Journal of Labor and Employment Law :

Whether these decisions are voluntary ‘choices’ or fueled by implicit or overt bias is extraordinarily difficult to discern and varies greatly from woman to woman, employer to employer, and job to job. Therefore, solutions cannot fit into a one-size-fits-all mold. Placing blame on employers and focusing narrowly on antidiscrimination legislation ignores a broader problem based on deeply entrenched societal assumptions related to how we collectively define our roles as women and men.

Further reading

National Board Quotas and the Gender Pay Gap among European Managers

David J. Maume, Orlaith Heymann and Leah Ruppanner. Work, Employment and Society. August 2019.

The gist: “Drawing a sample of managers in the 2010 European Social Survey, the gender gap in pay was decomposed, finding that employer devaluation of women accounted for the majority of the gender gap in pay.”

Does the Equal Pay Act Prohibit Discrimination on the Basis of Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity?

Adam Romero. Alabama Civil Rights & Civil Liberties Law Review , 2019.

The gist: “This article is the first to consider whether the Equal Pay Act’s prohibition of sex-based wage disparities encompasses wage disparities on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.”

A Systematic Review of the Gender Pay Gap and Factors That Predict It

Sebawit G. Bishu and Mohamad G. Alkadry. Administration & Society , March 2016.

The gist: “Confirming findings from past studies, this study also finds that the public sector performs relatively better in most aspects of the gender pay gap and factors that espouse it.”

Expert sources

Sebawit G. Bishu , assistant professor of public administration, University of Colorado Denver; research fellow, Harvard Kennedy School’s Women and Public Policy Program.

Stephanie Bornstein , associate professor of law, University of Florida Levin College of Law.

Claudia Goldin , Henry Lee Professor of Economics, Harvard University.

Adam Romero , director of legal scholarship and federal policy, UCLA School of Law.

Elena Simintzi , assistant professor of finance, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

This article was updated on January 31 to include the January 2020 Pew Research report .

*Dropped out of race since publication date.

About The Author

Clark Merrefield

Report | Wages, Incomes, and Wealth

“Women’s work” and the gender pay gap : How discrimination, societal norms, and other forces affect women’s occupational choices—and their pay

Report • By Jessica Schieder and Elise Gould • July 20, 2016

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What this report finds: Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men—despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment. Too often it is assumed that this pay gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors—particularly occupational differences between women and men—are themselves often affected by gender bias. For example, by the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work–family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.

Why it matters, and how to fix it: The gender wage gap is real—and hurts women across the board by suppressing their earnings and making it harder to balance work and family. Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should not include shifting the blame to women for not earning more. Rather, these attempts should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.

Introduction and key findings

Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men (Hegewisch and DuMonthier 2016). This is despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment.

Critics of this widely cited statistic claim it is not solid evidence of economic discrimination against women because it is unadjusted for characteristics other than gender that can affect earnings, such as years of education, work experience, and location. Many of these skeptics contend that the gender wage gap is driven not by discrimination, but instead by voluntary choices made by men and women—particularly the choice of occupation in which they work. And occupational differences certainly do matter—occupation and industry account for about half of the overall gender wage gap (Blau and Kahn 2016).

To isolate the impact of overt gender discrimination—such as a woman being paid less than her male coworker for doing the exact same job—it is typical to adjust for such characteristics. But these adjusted statistics can radically understate the potential for gender discrimination to suppress women’s earnings. This is because gender discrimination does not occur only in employers’ pay-setting practices. It can happen at every stage leading to women’s labor market outcomes.

Take one key example: occupation of employment. While controlling for occupation does indeed reduce the measured gender wage gap, the sorting of genders into different occupations can itself be driven (at least in part) by discrimination. By the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work–family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.

This paper explains why gender occupational sorting is itself part of the discrimination women face, examines how this sorting is shaped by societal and economic forces, and explains that gender pay gaps are present even  within  occupations.

Key points include:

• Gender pay gaps within occupations persist, even after accounting for years of experience, hours worked, and education.
• Decisions women make about their occupation and career do not happen in a vacuum—they are also shaped by society.
• The long hours required by the highest-paid occupations can make it difficult for women to succeed, since women tend to shoulder the majority of family caretaking duties.
• Many professions dominated by women are low paid, and professions that have become female-dominated have become lower paid.

This report examines wages on an hourly basis. Technically, this is an adjusted gender wage gap measure. As opposed to weekly or annual earnings, hourly earnings ignore the fact that men work more hours on average throughout a week or year. Thus, the hourly gender wage gap is a bit smaller than the 79 percent figure cited earlier. This minor adjustment allows for a comparison of women’s and men’s wages without assuming that women, who still shoulder a disproportionate amount of responsibilities at home, would be able or willing to work as many hours as their male counterparts. Examining the hourly gender wage gap allows for a more thorough conversation about how many factors create the wage gap women experience when they cash their paychecks.

Within-occupation gender wage gaps are large—and persist after controlling for education and other factors

Those keen on downplaying the gender wage gap often claim women voluntarily choose lower pay by disproportionately going into stereotypically female professions or by seeking out lower-paid positions. But even when men and women work in the same occupation—whether as hairdressers, cosmetologists, nurses, teachers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, or construction workers—men make more, on average, than women (CPS microdata 2011–2015).

As a thought experiment, imagine if women’s occupational distribution mirrored men’s. For example, if 2 percent of men are carpenters, suppose 2 percent of women become carpenters. What would this do to the wage gap? After controlling for differences in education and preferences for full-time work, Goldin (2014) finds that 32 percent of the gender pay gap would be closed.

However, leaving women in their current occupations and just closing the gaps between women and their male counterparts within occupations (e.g., if male and female civil engineers made the same per hour) would close 68 percent of the gap. This means examining why waiters and waitresses, for example, with the same education and work experience do not make the same amount per hour. To quote Goldin:

Another way to measure the effect of occupation is to ask what would happen to the aggregate gender gap if one equalized earnings by gender within each occupation or, instead, evened their proportions for each occupation. The answer is that equalizing earnings within each occupation matters far more than equalizing the proportions by each occupation. (Goldin 2014)

This phenomenon is not limited to low-skilled occupations, and women cannot educate themselves out of the gender wage gap (at least in terms of broad formal credentials). Indeed, women’s educational attainment outpaces men’s; 37.0 percent of women have a college or advanced degree, as compared with 32.5 percent of men (CPS ORG 2015). Furthermore, women earn less per hour at every education level, on average. As shown in Figure A , men with a college degree make more per hour than women with an advanced degree. Likewise, men with a high school degree make more per hour than women who attended college but did not graduate. Even straight out of college, women make $4 less per hour than men—a gap that has grown since 2000 (Kroeger, Cooke, and Gould 2016).

Women earn less than men at every education level : Average hourly wages, by gender and education, 2015

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The data underlying the figure.

Source :  EPI analysis of Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata

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Steering women to certain educational and professional career paths—as well as outright discrimination—can lead to different occupational outcomes

The gender pay gap is driven at least in part by the cumulative impact of many instances over the course of women’s lives when they are treated differently than their male peers. Girls can be steered toward gender-normative careers from a very early age. At a time when parental influence is key, parents are often more likely to expect their sons, rather than their daughters, to work in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields, even when their daughters perform at the same level in mathematics (OECD 2015).

Expectations can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2005 study found third-grade girls rated their math competency scores much lower than boys’, even when these girls’ performance did not lag behind that of their male counterparts (Herbert and Stipek 2005). Similarly, in states where people were more likely to say that “women [are] better suited for home” and “math is for boys,” girls were more likely to have lower math scores and higher reading scores (Pope and Sydnor 2010). While this only establishes a correlation, there is no reason to believe gender aptitude in reading and math would otherwise be related to geography. Parental expectations can impact performance by influencing their children’s self-confidence because self-confidence is associated with higher test scores (OECD 2015).

By the time young women graduate from high school and enter college, they already evaluate their career opportunities differently than young men do. Figure B shows college freshmen’s intended majors by gender. While women have increasingly gone into medical school and continue to dominate the nursing field, women are significantly less likely to arrive at college interested in engineering, computer science, or physics, as compared with their male counterparts.

Women arrive at college less interested in STEM fields as compared with their male counterparts : Intent of first-year college students to major in select STEM fields, by gender, 2014

Source:  EPI adaptation of Corbett and Hill (2015) analysis of Eagan et al. (2014)

These decisions to allow doors to lucrative job opportunities to close do not take place in a vacuum. Many factors might make it difficult for a young woman to see herself working in computer science or a similarly remunerative field. A particularly depressing example is the well-publicized evidence of sexism in the tech industry (Hewlett et al. 2008). Unfortunately, tech isn’t the only STEM field with this problem.

Young women may be discouraged from certain career paths because of industry culture. Even for women who go against the grain and pursue STEM careers, if employers in the industry foster an environment hostile to women’s participation, the share of women in these occupations will be limited. One 2008 study found that “52 percent of highly qualified females working for SET [science, technology, and engineering] companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures” (Hewlett et al. 2008). Extreme job pressures are defined as working more than 100 hours per week, needing to be available 24/7, working with or managing colleagues in multiple time zones, and feeling pressure to put in extensive face time (Hewlett et al. 2008). As compared with men, more than twice as many women engage in housework on a daily basis, and women spend twice as much time caring for other household members (BLS 2015). Because of these cultural norms, women are less likely to be able to handle these extreme work pressures. In addition, 63 percent of women in SET workplaces experience sexual harassment (Hewlett et al. 2008). To make matters worse, 51 percent abandon their SET training when they quit their job. All of these factors play a role in steering women away from highly paid occupations, particularly in STEM fields.

The long hours required for some of the highest-paid occupations are incompatible with historically gendered family responsibilities

Those seeking to downplay the gender wage gap often suggest that women who work hard enough and reach the apex of their field will see the full fruits of their labor. In reality, however, the gender wage gap is wider for those with higher earnings. Women in the top 95th percentile of the wage distribution experience a much larger gender pay gap than lower-paid women.

Again, this large gender pay gap between the highest earners is partially driven by gender bias. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin (2014) posits that high-wage firms have adopted pay-setting practices that disproportionately reward individuals who work very long and very particular hours. This means that even if men and women are equally productive per hour, individuals—disproportionately men—who are more likely to work excessive hours and be available at particular off-hours are paid more highly (Hersch and Stratton 2002; Goldin 2014; Landers, Rebitzer, and Taylor 1996).

It is clear why this disadvantages women. Social norms and expectations exert pressure on women to bear a disproportionate share of domestic work—particularly caring for children and elderly parents. This can make it particularly difficult for them (relative to their male peers) to be available at the drop of a hat on a Sunday evening after working a 60-hour week. To the extent that availability to work long and particular hours makes the difference between getting a promotion or seeing one’s career stagnate, women are disadvantaged.

And this disadvantage is reinforced in a vicious circle. Imagine a household where both members of a male–female couple have similarly demanding jobs. One partner’s career is likely to be prioritized if a grandparent is hospitalized or a child’s babysitter is sick. If the past history of employer pay-setting practices that disadvantage women has led to an already-existing gender wage gap for this couple, it can be seen as “rational” for this couple to prioritize the male’s career. This perpetuates the expectation that it always makes sense for women to shoulder the majority of domestic work, and further exacerbates the gender wage gap.

Female-dominated professions pay less, but it’s a chicken-and-egg phenomenon

Many women do go into low-paying female-dominated industries. Home health aides, for example, are much more likely to be women. But research suggests that women are making a logical choice, given existing constraints . This is because they will likely not see a significant pay boost if they try to buck convention and enter male-dominated occupations. Exceptions certainly exist, particularly in the civil service or in unionized workplaces (Anderson, Hegewisch, and Hayes 2015). However, if women in female-dominated occupations were to go into male-dominated occupations, they would often have similar or lower expected wages as compared with their female counterparts in female-dominated occupations (Pitts 2002). Thus, many women going into female-dominated occupations are actually situating themselves to earn higher wages. These choices thereby maximize their wages (Pitts 2002). This holds true for all categories of women except for the most educated, who are more likely to earn more in a male profession than a female profession. There is also evidence that if it becomes more lucrative for women to move into male-dominated professions, women will do exactly this (Pitts 2002). In short, occupational choice is heavily influenced by existing constraints based on gender and pay-setting across occupations.

To make matters worse, when women increasingly enter a field, the average pay in that field tends to decline, relative to other fields. Levanon, England, and Allison (2009) found that when more women entered an industry, the relative pay of that industry 10 years later was lower. Specifically, they found evidence of devaluation—meaning the proportion of women in an occupation impacts the pay for that industry because work done by women is devalued.

Computer programming is an example of a field that has shifted from being a very mixed profession, often associated with secretarial work in the past, to being a lucrative, male-dominated profession (Miller 2016; Oldenziel 1999). While computer programming has evolved into a more technically demanding occupation in recent decades, there is no skills-based reason why the field needed to become such a male-dominated profession. When men flooded the field, pay went up. In contrast, when women became park rangers, pay in that field went down (Miller 2016).

Further compounding this problem is that many professions where pay is set too low by market forces, but which clearly provide enormous social benefits when done well, are female-dominated. Key examples range from home health workers who care for seniors, to teachers and child care workers who educate today’s children. If closing gender pay differences can help boost pay and professionalism in these key sectors, it would be a huge win for the economy and society.

The gender wage gap is real—and hurts women across the board. Too often it is assumed that this gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors—particularly occupational differences between women and men—are themselves affected by gender bias. Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should not include shifting the blame to women for not earning more. Rather, these attempts should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.

— This paper was made possible by a grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

— The authors wish to thank Josh Bivens, Barbara Gault, and Heidi Hartman for their helpful comments.

About the authors

Jessica Schieder joined EPI in 2015. As a research assistant, she supports the research of EPI’s economists on topics such as the labor market, wage trends, executive compensation, and inequality. Prior to joining EPI, Jessica worked at the Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) as a revenue and spending policies analyst, where she examined how budget and tax policy decisions impact working families. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international political economy from Georgetown University.

Elise Gould , senior economist, joined EPI in 2003. Her research areas include wages, poverty, economic mobility, and health care. She is a co-author of The State of Working America, 12th Edition . In the past, she has authored a chapter on health in The State of Working America 2008/09; co-authored a book on health insurance coverage in retirement; published in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education ,  Challenge Magazine , and Tax Notes; and written for academic journals including Health Economics , Health Affairs, Journal of Aging and Social Policy, Risk Management & Insurance Review, Environmental Health Perspectives , and International Journal of Health Services . She holds a master’s in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Anderson, Julie, Ariane Hegewisch, and Jeff Hayes 2015. The Union Advantage for Women . Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn 2016. The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations . National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 21913.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2015. American Time Use Survey public data series. U.S. Census Bureau.

Corbett, Christianne, and Catherine Hill. 2015. Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing . American Association of University Women (AAUW).

Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata (CPS ORG). 2011–2015. Survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics [ machine-readable microdata file ]. U.S. Census Bureau.

Goldin, Claudia. 2014. “ A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter .” American Economic Review, vol. 104, no. 4, 1091–1119.

Hegewisch, Ariane, and Asha DuMonthier. 2016. The Gender Wage Gap: 2015; Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity . Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Herbert, Jennifer, and Deborah Stipek. 2005. “The Emergence of Gender Difference in Children’s Perceptions of Their Academic Competence.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology , vol. 26, no. 3, 276–295.

Hersch, Joni, and Leslie S. Stratton. 2002. “ Housework and Wages .” The Journal of Human Resources , vol. 37, no. 1, 217–229.

Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, Carolyn Buck Luce, Lisa J. Servon, Laura Sherbin, Peggy Shiller, Eytan Sosnovich, and Karen Sumberg. 2008. The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology . Harvard Business Review.

Kroeger, Teresa, Tanyell Cooke, and Elise Gould. 2016.  The Class of 2016: The Labor Market Is Still Far from Ideal for Young Graduates . Economic Policy Institute.

Landers, Renee M., James B. Rebitzer, and Lowell J. Taylor. 1996. “ Rat Race Redux: Adverse Selection in the Determination of Work Hours in Law Firms .” American Economic Review , vol. 86, no. 3, 329–348.

Levanon, Asaf, Paula England, and Paul Allison. 2009. “Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950-2000 U.S. Census Data.” Social Forces, vol. 88, no. 2, 865–892.

Miller, Claire Cain. 2016. “As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops.” New York Times , March 18.

Oldenziel, Ruth. 1999. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2015. The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behavior, Confidence .

Pitts, Melissa M. 2002. Why Choose Women’s Work If It Pays Less? A Structural Model of Occupational Choice. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Working Paper 2002-30.

Pope, Devin G., and Justin R. Sydnor. 2010. “ Geographic Variation in the Gender Differences in Test Scores .” Journal of Economic Perspectives , vol. 24, no. 2, 95–108.

See related work on Wages, Incomes, and Wealth | Women

See more work by Jessica Schieder and Elise Gould

Everything you need to know about pushing for pay equity

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Workers worldwide look forward to payday. But while a paycheck may bring a sense of relief, satisfaction, or joy, it can also represent an injustice—a stark reminder of persistent inequalities between men and women in the workplace.

The gender pay gap stands at 20 per cent , meaning women workers earn 80 per cent of what men do. For women of colour, migrant women, those with disabilities, and women with children, the gap is even greater.

The cumulative effect of pay disparities has real, daily negative consequences for women, their families, and society, especially during crises. The widespread effects of COVID-19 have plunged up to 95 million people into extreme poverty, with one in every 10 women globally living in extreme poverty . If current trends continue, 342.4 million women and girls will be living on less than $2.15 a day by 2030.

What do we mean by equal pay for work of equal value?

Equal pay for work of equal value, as defined by the ILO Equal Remuneration Convention , means that all workers are entitled to receive equal remuneration not only for identical tasks but also for different work considered of equal value. This distinction is crucial because jobs held by women and men may involve varying qualifications, skills, responsibilities, or working conditions, yet hold equal value and warrant equal pay.

In 2020, New Zealand passed the Equal Pay Amendment Bill , ensuring that women and men are paid equally for work that’s different but has equal value, including in chronically underpaid female-dominated industries. 

It is also important to recognize that remuneration is more than a basic wage; it encompasses all the elements of earnings. This includes overtime pay, bonuses, travel allowances, company shares, insurance, and other benefits.

Why does the gender pay gap persist?

The gender pay gap originates from ingrained inequalities. Women, particularly migrant women, are overrepresented in the informal sector. Look around you, from street vending to domestic service, from coffee shop attendants to subsistence farming. Women fill informal jobs that often fall outside the domains of labour laws, trapping them in low-paying, unsafe working environments, without social benefits. These poor conditions for women workers perpetuate the gender pay gap.

Women also do  three more hours of daily care work  than men , globally. This includes household tasks such as cooking, cleaning, fetching firewood and water, and taking care of children and the elderly. Although care work is the backbone of thriving families, communities, and economies, it remains undervalued and underrecognized. Try calculating your daily load with  UN Women’s unpaid care calculator .

The  motherhood penalty exacerbates pay inequity, with working mothers facing lower wages, a disparity that jumps as the number of children a woman has increases. Lower wages for mothers are linked to reduced working time, employment in more family-friendly jobs that tend to be lower paying, hiring and promotion decisions that penalize the careers of mothers, and a lack of programmes to support women’s return to work after time out of the labour market.

Restrictive, traditional gender roles are also spurring pay inequalities. Gender stereotypes steer women away from occupations traditionally dominated by men and push them toward care-focused work that is often regarded as “unskilled,” or “soft-skilled” and therefore, lower paid.

Furthermore, discriminatory hiring practices and promotion decisions that prevent women from gaining leadership roles and highly paid positions sustain the gender pay gap.

Why is pay equity an urgent issue?

Pay equity matters because it is a glaring injustice and subjects millions of women and families to lives of entrenched poverty and opportunity gaps. At the current rate, we risk leaving more than 340 million women and girls in abject poverty by 2030 , and an alarming 4 per cent could grapple with extreme food insecurity by that year.

Women also experience significantly lower social protection coverage than men, a discrepancy that largely reflects and reproduces their lower labour force participation rates, higher levels of temporary and precarious work, and informal employment. All these factors contribute to lower income , savings, and pensions of women and gendered poverty in old age.

What should be done?

As more women are plunged into poverty, the fight for equal pay and pay equity takes on a new sense of urgency because those who earn the least are most damaged by income discrepancy.

In the United States, Black women earn only 63.7 cents , Native women 59 cents , and Latinas 57 cents for every dollar that white men earn. Where money is tight, lower pay can prevent women and families from putting food on the table, securing safe housing, and accessing critical medical care and education—impacts that can perpetuate cycles of poverty across generations.

It is urgent that we put female workers on equal footing as male workers. In a world on the brink of a looming care deficit,  women make up 67 per cent of workers providing essential health and social care services globally . Governments must address underpaid and undervalued jobs in the care sector, including in education, health care and social services, all jobs that women predominantly occupy.

What does the data say about pay equity around the world? 

Unequal pay is a stubborn and universal problem. Despite significant progress in women’s education and labour market participation, progress in closing the gender pay gap has been too slow. At this pace, it will take  almost 300 years to achieve economic gender parity .

Women workers’ average pay is generally lower than men’s in all countries and for all levels of education, and age groups, with women earning on average 80 per cent what men ear n. Women in male-dominated industries may earn more than those in female-dominated industries, but the gender pay gap persists across all sectors.

While gender pay gap estimates can vary substantially across regions and even within countries, higher income countries tend to have lower levels of wage inequality compared to low and middle-income countries. However, estimates of the gender pay gap understate the real extent of the issue, particularly in developing countries, because of a lack of information about informal economies, which are disproportionately made up of women workers, so the full picture is likely worse than what the available data shows us.

Explore  UN Women’s report on the gender pay gap in Eastern and Southern Africa .

Closing the gender pay gap requires a set of measures that push for decent work for all people. This includes measures that promote the formalization of the informal economy, bringing informal workers under the umbrella of legal and effective protection and empowering them to better defend their interests.

Ensuring workers’ right to organize and bargain collectively is an important part of the solution. Women must be involved in employer and union leadership, enabling legislation that establishes comprehensive frameworks for gender equality in the workplace.

Economic empowerment Chief at UN Women Dr. Jemimah Njuki says that, “The gender pay gap requires all stakeholders, including employers, governments, trade unions take full responsibility and work side by side to address these challenges. Women deserve equal pay for work of equal value”.

[Last updated February 2024] 

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5 Powerful Essays Advocating for Gender Equality

Gender equality – which becomes reality when all genders are treated fairly and allowed equal opportunities –  is a complicated human rights issue for every country in the world. Recent statistics are sobering. According to the World Economic Forum, it will take 108 years to achieve gender parity . The biggest gaps are found in political empowerment and economics. Also, there are currently just six countries that give women and men equal legal work rights. Generally, women are only given ¾ of the rights given to men. To learn more about how gender equality is measured, how it affects both women and men, and what can be done, here are five essays making a fair point.

Take a free course on Gender Equality offered by top universities!

“Countries With Less Gender Equity Have More Women In STEM — Huh?” – Adam Mastroianni and Dakota McCoy

This essay from two Harvard PhD candidates (Mastroianni in psychology and McCoy in biology) takes a closer look at a recent study that showed that in countries with lower gender equity, more women are in STEM. The study’s researchers suggested that this is because women are actually especially interested in STEM fields, and because they are given more choice in Western countries, they go with different careers. Mastroianni and McCoy disagree.

They argue the research actually shows that cultural attitudes and discrimination are impacting women’s interests, and that bias and discrimination is present even in countries with better gender equality. The problem may lie in the Gender Gap Index (GGI), which tracks factors like wage disparity and government representation. To learn why there’s more women in STEM from countries with less gender equality, a more nuanced and complex approach is needed.

“Men’s health is better, too, in countries with more gender equality” – Liz Plank

When it comes to discussions about gender equality, it isn’t uncommon for someone in the room to say, “What about the men?” Achieving gender equality has been difficult because of the underlying belief that giving women more rights and freedom somehow takes rights away from men. The reality, however, is that gender equality is good for everyone. In Liz Plank’s essay, which is an adaption from her book For the Love of Men: A Vision for Mindful Masculinity, she explores how in Iceland, the #1 ranked country for gender equality, men live longer. Plank lays out the research for why this is, revealing that men who hold “traditional” ideas about masculinity are more likely to die by suicide and suffer worse health. Anxiety about being the only financial provider plays a big role in this, so in countries where women are allowed education and equal earning power, men don’t shoulder the burden alone.

Liz Plank is an author and award-winning journalist with Vox, where she works as a senior producer and political correspondent. In 2015, Forbes named her one of their “30 Under 30” in the Media category. She’s focused on feminist issues throughout her career.

“China’s #MeToo Moment” –  Jiayang Fan

Some of the most visible examples of gender inequality and discrimination comes from “Me Too” stories. Women are coming forward in huge numbers relating how they’ve been harassed and abused by men who have power over them. Most of the time, established systems protect these men from accountability. In this article from Jiayang Fan, a New Yorker staff writer, we get a look at what’s happening in China.

The essay opens with a story from a PhD student inspired by the United States’ Me Too movement to open up about her experience with an academic adviser. Her story led to more accusations against the adviser, and he was eventually dismissed. This is a rare victory, because as Fan says, China employs a more rigid system of patriarchy and hierarchy. There aren’t clear definitions or laws surrounding sexual harassment. Activists are charting unfamiliar territory, which this essay explores.

“Men built this system. No wonder gender equality remains as far off as ever.” – Ellie Mae O’Hagan

Freelance journalist Ellie Mae O’Hagan (whose book The New Normal is scheduled for a May 2020 release) is discouraged that gender equality is so many years away. She argues that it’s because the global system of power at its core is broken.  Even when women are in power, which is proportionally rare on a global scale, they deal with a system built by the patriarchy. O’Hagan’s essay lays out ideas for how to fix what’s fundamentally flawed, so gender equality can become a reality.

Ideas include investing in welfare; reducing gender-based violence (which is mostly men committing violence against women); and strengthening trade unions and improving work conditions. With a system that’s not designed to put women down, the world can finally achieve gender equality.

“Invisibility of Race in Gender Pay Gap Discussions” – Bonnie Chu

The gender pay gap has been a pressing issue for many years in the United States, but most discussions miss the factor of race. In this concise essay, Senior Contributor Bonnie Chu examines the reality, writing that within the gender pay gap, there’s other gaps when it comes to black, Native American, and Latina women. Asian-American women, on the other hand, are paid 85 cents for every dollar. This data is extremely important and should be present in discussions about the gender pay gap. It reminds us that when it comes to gender equality, there’s other factors at play, like racism.

Bonnie Chu is a gender equality advocate and a Forbes 30 Under 30 social entrepreneur. She’s the founder and CEO of Lensational, which empowers women through photography, and the Managing Director of The Social Investment Consultancy.

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Gender pay gap in U.S. hasn’t changed much in two decades

The gender gap in pay has remained relatively stable in the United States over the past 20 years or so. In 2022, women earned an average of 82% of what men earned, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers. These results are similar to where the pay gap stood in 2002, when women earned 80% as much as men.

As has long been the case, the wage gap is smaller for workers ages 25 to 34 than for all workers 16 and older. In 2022, women ages 25 to 34 earned an average of 92 cents for every dollar earned by a man in the same age group – an 8-cent gap. By comparison, the gender pay gap among workers of all ages that year was 18 cents.

While the gender pay gap has not changed much in the last two decades, it has narrowed considerably when looking at the longer term, both among all workers ages 16 and older and among those ages 25 to 34. The estimated 18-cent gender pay gap among all workers in 2022 was down from 35 cents in 1982. And the 8-cent gap among workers ages 25 to 34 in 2022 was down from a 26-cent gap four decades earlier.

The gender pay gap measures the difference in median hourly earnings between men and women who work full or part time in the United States. Pew Research Center’s estimate of the pay gap is based on an analysis of Current Population Survey (CPS) monthly outgoing rotation group files ( IPUMS ) from January 1982 to December 2022, combined to create annual files. To understand how we calculate the gender pay gap, read our 2013 post, “How Pew Research Center measured the gender pay gap.”

The COVID-19 outbreak affected data collection efforts by the U.S. government in its surveys, especially in 2020 and 2021, limiting in-person data collection and affecting response rates. It is possible that some measures of economic outcomes and how they vary across demographic groups are affected by these changes in data collection.

In addition to findings about the gender wage gap, this analysis includes information from a Pew Research Center survey about the perceived reasons for the pay gap, as well as the pressures and career goals of U.S. men and women. The survey was conducted among 5,098 adults and includes a subset of questions asked only for 2,048 adults who are employed part time or full time, from Oct. 10-16, 2022. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used in this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology .

The  U.S. Census Bureau has also analyzed the gender pay gap, though its analysis looks only at full-time workers (as opposed to full- and part-time workers). In 2021, full-time, year-round working women earned 84% of what their male counterparts earned, on average, according to the Census Bureau’s most recent analysis.

Much of the gender pay gap has been explained by measurable factors such as educational attainment, occupational segregation and work experience. The narrowing of the gap over the long term is attributable in large part to gains women have made in each of these dimensions.

Related: The Enduring Grip of the Gender Pay Gap

Even though women have increased their presence in higher-paying jobs traditionally dominated by men, such as professional and managerial positions, women as a whole continue to be overrepresented in lower-paying occupations relative to their share of the workforce. This may contribute to gender differences in pay.

Other factors that are difficult to measure, including gender discrimination, may also contribute to the ongoing wage discrepancy.

Perceived reasons for the gender wage gap

When asked about the factors that may play a role in the gender wage gap, half of U.S. adults point to women being treated differently by employers as a major reason, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2022. Smaller shares point to women making different choices about how to balance work and family (42%) and working in jobs that pay less (34%).

There are some notable differences between men and women in views of what’s behind the gender wage gap. Women are much more likely than men (61% vs. 37%) to say a major reason for the gap is that employers treat women differently. And while 45% of women say a major factor is that women make different choices about how to balance work and family, men are slightly less likely to hold that view (40% say this).

Parents with children younger than 18 in the household are more likely than those who don’t have young kids at home (48% vs. 40%) to say a major reason for the pay gap is the choices that women make about how to balance family and work. On this question, differences by parental status are evident among both men and women.

Views about reasons for the gender wage gap also differ by party. About two-thirds of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents (68%) say a major factor behind wage differences is that employers treat women differently, but far fewer Republicans and Republican leaners (30%) say the same. Conversely, Republicans are more likely than Democrats to say women’s choices about how to balance family and work (50% vs. 36%) and their tendency to work in jobs that pay less (39% vs. 30%) are major reasons why women earn less than men.

Democratic and Republican women are more likely than their male counterparts in the same party to say a major reason for the gender wage gap is that employers treat women differently. About three-quarters of Democratic women (76%) say this, compared with 59% of Democratic men. And while 43% of Republican women say unequal treatment by employers is a major reason for the gender wage gap, just 18% of GOP men share that view.

Pressures facing working women and men

Family caregiving responsibilities bring different pressures for working women and men, and research has shown that being a mother can reduce women’s earnings , while fatherhood can increase men’s earnings .

Employed women and men are about equally likely to say they feel a great deal of pressure to support their family financially and to be successful in their jobs and careers, according to the Center’s October survey. But women, and particularly working mothers, are more likely than men to say they feel a great deal of pressure to focus on responsibilities at home.

About half of employed women (48%) report feeling a great deal of pressure to focus on their responsibilities at home, compared with 35% of employed men. Among working mothers with children younger than 18 in the household, two-thirds (67%) say the same, compared with 45% of working dads.

When it comes to supporting their family financially, similar shares of working moms and dads (57% vs. 62%) report they feel a great deal of pressure, but this is driven mainly by the large share of unmarried working mothers who say they feel a great deal of pressure in this regard (77%). Among those who are married, working dads are far more likely than working moms (60% vs. 43%) to say they feel a great deal of pressure to support their family financially. (There were not enough unmarried working fathers in the sample to analyze separately.)

About four-in-ten working parents say they feel a great deal of pressure to be successful at their job or career. These findings don’t differ by gender.

Gender differences in job roles, aspirations

Overall, a quarter of employed U.S. adults say they are currently the boss or one of the top managers where they work, according to the Center’s survey. Another 33% say they are not currently the boss but would like to be in the future, while 41% are not and do not aspire to be the boss or one of the top managers.

Men are more likely than women to be a boss or a top manager where they work (28% vs. 21%). This is especially the case among employed fathers, 35% of whom say they are the boss or one of the top managers where they work. (The varying attitudes between fathers and men without children at least partly reflect differences in marital status and educational attainment between the two groups.)

In addition to being less likely than men to say they are currently the boss or a top manager at work, women are also more likely to say they wouldn’t want to be in this type of position in the future. More than four-in-ten employed women (46%) say this, compared with 37% of men. Similar shares of men (35%) and women (31%) say they are not currently the boss but would like to be one day. These patterns are similar among parents.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published on March 22, 2019. Anna Brown and former Pew Research Center writer/editor Amanda Barroso contributed to an earlier version of this analysis. Here are the questions used in this analysis, along with responses, and its methodology .

What is the gender wage gap in your metropolitan area? Find out with our pay gap calculator

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Women have gained ground in the nation’s highest-paying occupations, but still lag behind men

Diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace, the enduring grip of the gender pay gap, more than twice as many americans support than oppose the #metoo movement, women now outnumber men in the u.s. college-educated labor force, most popular.

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3 Things You Should Know About the Gender Pay Gap

In this section.

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What does the evidence-based research suggest to explain the gender pay gap? 

In the United States, full-time women workers earn, on average, 20 percent less than men. In this video, Hannah Riley Bowles, Roy E. Larsen Senior Lecturer in Public Policy and Management; Co-director, Women and Public Policy Program; Area Chair, Management, Leadership and Decision Sciences Area, lists three things that explains this gender pay gap.

• Bowles, H.R. (2014).  Why women don't negotiate their job offers .   Harvard Business Review   [website]. Retrieved from  https://hbr.org/2014/06/why-women-dont-negotiate-their-job-offers .
• Goldin C. (2014).  A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter .   American Economic Review, 104 (4), 1091-1119.
• Goldin, C. and Katz, L.F. (2011).  The Cost of Workplace Flexibility for High-Powered Professionals .   The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 638 (1), 45-67.
• Kim, M. (2015).  Pay Secrecy and the Gender Wage Gap in the United States.  Industrial Relations: A Journal of Economy and Society, 54 (4), 648-667.
• Blau, F. (Host). (2017, March 23).  The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations with Francine Blau   [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from  https://www.podbean.com/eu/pb-mdhms-68f668 .
• Dubner, S. (Host). (2016, January 7).  The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap  [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from  http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender-pay-gap-a-n... .
• Moss-Coane, M. (Host). (2019, April 23).  Equal Pay Day: closing the gender wage gap   [Audio podcast]. Retrieved from  https://whyy.org/episodes/equal-pay-day-closing-the-gender-pay-gap/ .
• NBC Nightly News (Producer). (2016, August 28).  Massachusetts Passes New Law Aimed at Equal Pay with WAPPP Executive Director Victoria A. Budson .  [Video file]. Retrieved from  https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/massachusetts-passes-new-law-aimed-at-equal-pay-753216067634 .
• Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto (Producer). (2017, April 20).  Gender, Equity and Prosperity with WAPPP Executive Director Victoria A. Budson . [Video file]. Retrieved from  https://youtu.be/NRqEGoqxk4A .

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The persistence of pay inequality: The gender pay gap in an anonymous online labor market

Leib litman.

1 Department of Psychology, Lander College, Flushing, New York, United States of America

Jonathan Robinson

2 Department of Computer Science, Lander College, Flushing, New York, United States of America

3 Department of Health Policy & Management, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

Cheskie Rosenzweig

4 Department of Clinical Psychology, Columbia University, New York, New York, United States of America

Joshua Waxman

5 Department of Computer Science, Stern College for Women, New York, New York, United States of America

Lisa M. Bates

6 Department of Epidemiology, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University New York, New York, United States of America

Associated Data

Due to the sensitive nature of some of the data, and the terms of service of the websites used during data collection (including CloudResearch and MTurk), CloudResearch cannot release the full data set to make it publically available. The data are on CloudResearch's Sequel servers located at Queens College in the city of New York. CloudResearch makes data available to be accessed by researchers for replication purposes, on the CloudResearch premises, in the same way the data were accessed and analysed by the authors of this manuscript. The contact person at CloudResearch who can help researchers access the data set is Tzvi Abberbock, who can be reached at [email protected] .

Studies of the gender pay gap are seldom able to simultaneously account for the range of alternative putative mechanisms underlying it. Using CloudResearch, an online microtask platform connecting employers to workers who perform research-related tasks, we examine whether gender pay discrepancies are still evident in a labor market characterized by anonymity, relatively homogeneous work, and flexibility. For 22,271 Mechanical Turk workers who participated in nearly 5 million tasks, we analyze hourly earnings by gender, controlling for key covariates which have been shown previously to lead to differential pay for men and women. On average, women’s hourly earnings were 10.5% lower than men’s. Several factors contributed to the gender pay gap, including the tendency for women to select tasks that have a lower advertised hourly pay. This study provides evidence that gender pay gaps can arise despite the absence of overt discrimination, labor segregation, and inflexible work arrangements, even after experience, education, and other human capital factors are controlled for. Findings highlight the need to examine other possible causes of the gender pay gap. Potential strategies for reducing the pay gap on online labor markets are also discussed.

Introduction

The gender pay gap, the disparity in earnings between male and female workers, has been the focus of empirical research in the US for decades, as well as legislative and executive action under the Obama administration [ 1 , 2 ]. Trends dating back to the 1960s show a long period in which women’s earnings were approximately 60% of their male counterparts, followed by increases in women’s earnings starting in the 1980s, which began to narrow, but not close, the gap which persists today [ 3 ]. More recent data from 2014 show that overall, the median weekly earnings of women working full time were 79–83% of what men earned [ 4 – 9 ].

The extensive literature seeking to explain the gender pay gap and its trajectory over time in traditional labor markets suggests it is a function of multiple structural and individual-level processes that reflect both the near-term and cumulative effects of gender relations and roles over the life course. Broadly speaking, the drivers of the gender pay gap can be categorized as: 1) human capital or productivity factors such as education, skills, and workforce experience; 2) industry or occupational segregation, which some estimates suggest accounts for approximately half of the pay gap; 3) gender-specific temporal flexibility constraints which can affect promotions and remuneration; and finally, 4) gender discrimination operating in hiring, promotion, task assignment, and/or compensation. The latter mechanism is often estimated by inference as a function of unexplained residual effects of gender on payment after accounting for other factors, an approach which is most persuasive in studies of narrowly restricted populations of workers such as lawyers [ 10 ] and academics of specific disciplines [ 11 ]. A recent estimate suggests this unexplained gender difference in earnings can account for approximately 40% of the pay gap [ 3 ]. However, more direct estimations of discriminatory processes are also available from experimental evidence, including field audit and lab-based studies [ 12 – 14 ]. Finally, gender pay gaps have also been attributed to differential discrimination encountered by men and women on the basis of parental status, often known as the ‘motherhood penalty’ [ 15 ].

Non-traditional ‘gig economy’ labor markets and the gender pay gap

In recent years there has been a dramatic rise in nontraditional ‘gig economy’ labor markets, which entail independent workers hired for single projects or tasks often on a short-term basis with minimal contractual engagement. “Microtask” platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) and Crowdflower have become a major sector of the gig economy, offering a source of easily accessible supplementary income through performance of small tasks online at a time and place convenient to the worker. Available tasks can range from categorizing receipts to transcription and proofreading services, and are posted online by the prospective employer. Workers registered with the platform then elect to perform the advertised tasks and receive compensation upon completion of satisfactory work [ 16 ]. An estimated 0.4% of US adults are currently receiving income from such platforms each month [ 17 ], and microtask work is a growing sector of the service economy in the United States [ 18 ]. Although still relatively small, these emerging labor market environments provide a unique opportunity to investigate the gender pay gap in ways not possible within traditional labor markets, due to features (described below) that allow researchers to simultaneously account for multiple putative mechanisms thought to underlie the pay gap.

The present study utilizes the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform as a case study to examine whether a gender pay gap remains evident when the main causes of the pay gap identified in the literature do not apply or can be accounted for in a single investigation. MTurk is an online microtask platform that connects employers (‘requesters’) to employees (‘workers’) who perform jobs called “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs). The platform allows requesters to post tasks on a dashboard with a short description of the HIT, the compensation being offered, and the time the HIT is expected to take. When complete, the requester either approves or rejects the work based on quality. If approved, payment is quickly accessible to workers. The gender of workers who complete these HITs is not known to the requesters, but was accessible to researchers for the present study (along with other sociodemographic information and pay rates) based on metadata collected through CloudResearch (formerly TurkPrime), a platform commonly used to conduct social and behavioral research on MTurk [ 19 ].

Evaluating pay rates of workers on MTurk requires estimating the pay per hour of each task that a worker accepts which can then be averaged together. All HITs posted on MTurk through CloudResearch display how much a HIT pays and an estimated time that it takes for that HIT to be completed. Workers use this information to determine what the corresponding hourly pay rate of a task is likely to be, and much of our analysis of the gender pay gap is based on this advertised pay rate of all completed surveys. We also calculate an estimate of the gender pay gap based on actual completion times to examine potential differences in task completion speed, which we refer to as estimated actual wages (see Methods section for details).

Previous studies have found that both task completion time and the selection of tasks influences the gender pay gap in at least some gig economy markets. For example, a gender pay gap was observed among Uber drivers, with men consistently earning higher pay than women [ 20 ]. Some of the contributing factors to this pay gap include that male Uber drivers selected different tasks than female drivers, including being more willing to work at night and to work in neighborhoods that were perceived to be more dangerous. Male drivers were also likely to drive faster than their female counterparts. These findings show that person-level factors like task selection, and speed can influence the gender pay gap within gig economy markets.

MTurk is uniquely suited to examine the gender pay gap because it is possible to account simultaneously for multiple structural and individual-level factors that have been shown to produce pay gaps. These include discrimination, work heterogeneity (leading to occupational segregation), and job flexibility, as well as human capital factors such as experience and education.

Discrimination

When employers post their HITs on MTurk they have no way of knowing the demographic characteristics of the workers who accept those tasks, including their gender. While MTurk allows for selective recruitment of specific demographic groups, the MTurk tasks examined in this study are exclusively open to all workers, independent of their gender or other demographic characteristics. Therefore, features of the worker’s identity that might be the basis for discrimination cannot factor into an employer’s decision-making regarding hiring or pay.

Task heterogeneity

Another factor making MTurk uniquely suited for the examination of the gender pay gap is the relative homogeneity of tasks performed by the workers, minimizing the potential influence of gender differences in the type of work pursued on earnings and the pay gap. Work on the MTurk platform consists mostly of short tasks such as 10–15 minute surveys and categorization tasks. In addition, the only information that workers have available to them to choose tasks, other than pay, is the tasks’ titles and descriptions. We additionally classified tasks based on similarity and accounted for possible task heterogeneity effects in our analyses.

Job flexibility

MTurk is not characterized by the same inflexibilities as are often encountered in traditional labor markets. Workers can work at any time of the day or day of the week. This increased flexibility may be expected to provide more opportunities for participation in this labor market for those who are otherwise constrained by family or other obligations.

Human capital factors

It is possible that the more experienced workers could learn over time how to identify higher paying tasks by virtue of, for example, identifying qualities of tasks that can be completed more quickly than the advertised required time estimate. Further, if experience is correlated with gender, it could contribute to a gender pay gap and thus needs to be controlled for. Using CloudResearch metadata, we are able to account for experience on the platform. Additionally, we account for multiple sociodemographic variables, including age, marital status, parental status, education, income (from all sources), and race using the sociodemographic data available through CloudResearch.

Expected gender pay gap findings on MTurk

Due to the aforementioned factors that are unique to the MTurk marketplace–e.g., anonymity, self-selection into tasks, relative homogeneity of the tasks performed, and flexible work scheduling–we did not expect a gender pay gap to be evident on the platform to the same extent as in traditional labor markets. However, potential gender differences in task selection and completion speed, which have implications for earnings, merit further consideration. For example, though we expect the relative homogeneity of the MTurk tasks to minimize gender differences in task selection that could mimic occupational segregation, we do account for potential subtle residual differences in tasks that could differentially attract male and female workers and indirectly lead to pay differentials if those tasks that are preferentially selected by men pay a higher rate. To do this we categorize all tasks based on their descriptions using K-clustering and add the clusters as covariates to our models. In addition, we separately examine the gender pay gap within each topic-cluster.

In addition, if workers who are experienced on the platform are better able to find higher paying HITs, and if experience is correlated with gender, it may lead to gender differences in earnings. Theoretically, other factors that may vary with gender could also influence task selection. Previous studies of the pay gap in traditional markets indicate that reservation wages, defined as the pay threshold at which a person is willing to accept work, may be lower among women with children compared to women without, and to that of men as well [ 21 ]. Thus, if women on MTurk are more likely to have young children than men, they may be more willing to accept available work even if it pays relatively poorly. Other factors such as income, education level, and age may similarly influence reservation wages if they are associated with opportunities to find work outside of microtask platforms. To the extent that these demographics correlate with gender they may give rise to a gender pay gap. Therefore we consider age, experience on MTurk, education, income, marital status, and parental status as covariates in our models.

Task completion speed may vary by gender for several reasons, including potential gender differences in past experience on the platform. We examine the estimated actual pay gap per hour based on HIT payment and estimated actual completion time to examine the effects of completion speed on the wage gap. We also examine the gender pay gap based on advertised pay rates, which are not dependent on completion speed and more directly measure how gender differences in task selection can lead to a pay gap. Below, we explain how these were calculated based on meta-data from CloudResearch.

To summarize, the overall goal of the present study was to explore whether gender pay differentials arise within a unique, non-traditional and anonymous online labor market, where known drivers of the gender pay gap either do not apply or can be accounted for statistically.

Materials and methods

Amazon mechanical turk and cloudresearch.

Started in 2005, the original purpose of the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform was to allow requesters to crowdsource tasks that could not easily be handled by existing technological solutions such as receipt copying, image categorization, and website testing. As of 2010, researchers increasingly began using MTurk for a wide variety of research tasks in the social, behavioral, and medical sciences, and it is currently used by thousands of academic researchers across hundreds of academic departments [ 22 ]. These research-related HITs are typically listed on the platform in generic terms such as, “Ten-minute social science study,” or “A study about public opinion attitudes.”

Because MTurk was not originally designed solely for research purposes, its interface is not optimized for some scientific applications. For this reason, third party add-on toolkits have been created that offer critical research tools for scientific use. One such platform, CloudResearch (formerly TurkPrime), allows requesters to manage multiple research functions, such as applying sampling criteria and facilitating longitudinal studies, through a link to their MTurk account. CloudResearch’s functionality has been described extensively elsewhere [ 19 ]. While the demographic characteristics of workers are not available to MTurk requesters, we were able to retroactively identify the gender and other demographic characteristics of workers through the CloudResearch platform. CloudResearch also facilitates access to data for each HIT, including pay, estimated length, and title.

The study was an analysis of previously collected metadata, which were analyzed anonymously. We complied with the terms of service for all data collected from CloudResearch, and MTurk. The approving institutional review board for this study was IntegReview.

Analytic sample

We analyzed the nearly 5 million tasks completed during an 18-month period between January 2016 and June 2017 by 12,312 female and 9,959 male workers who had complete data on key demographic characteristics. To be included in the analysis a HIT had to be fully completed, not just accepted, by the worker, and had to be accepted (paid for) by the requester. Although the vast majority of HITs were open to both males and females, a small percentage of HITs are intended for a specific gender. Because our goal was to exclusively analyze HITs for which the requesters did not know the gender of workers, we excluded any HITs using gender-specific inclusion or exclusion criteria from the analyses. In addition, we removed from the analysis any HITs that were part of follow-up studies in which it would be possible for the requester to know the gender of the worker from the prior data collection. Finally, where possible, CloudResearch tracks demographic information on workers across multiple HITs over time. To minimize misclassification of gender, we excluded the 0.3% of assignments for which gender was unknown with at least 95% consistency across HITs.

The main exposure variable is worker gender and the outcome variables are estimated actual hourly pay accrued through completing HITs, and advertised hourly pay for completed HITs. Estimated actual hourly wages are based on the estimated length in minutes and compensation in dollars per HIT as posted on the dashboard by the requester. We refer to actual pay as estimated because sometimes people work multiple assignments at the same time (which is allowed on the platform), or may simultaneously perform other unrelated activities and therefore not work on the HIT the entire time the task is open. We also considered several covariates to approximate human capital factors that could potentially influence earnings on this platform, including marital status, education, household income, number of children, race/ethnicity, age, and experience (number of HITs previously completed). Additional covariates included task length, task cluster (see below), and the serial order with which workers accepted the HIT in order to account for potential differences in HIT acceptance speed that may relate to the pay gap.

Database and analytic approach

Data were exported from CloudResearch’s database into Stata in long-form format to represent each task on a single row. For the purposes of this paper, we use “HIT” and “study” interchangeably to refer to a study put up on the MTurk dashboard which aims to collect data from multiple participants. A HIT or study consist of multiple “assignments” which is a single task completed by a single participant. Columns represented variables such as demographic information, payment, and estimated HIT length. Column variables also included unique IDs for workers, HITs (a single study posted by a requester), and requesters, allowing for a multi-level modeling analytic approach with assignments nested within workers. Individual assignments (a single task completed by a single worker) were the unit of analysis for all models.

Linear regression models were used to calculate the gender pay gap using two dependent variables 1) women’s estimated actual earnings relative to men’s and 2) women’s selection of tasks based on advertised earnings relative to men’s. We first examined the actual pay model, to see the gender pay gap when including an estimate of task completion speed, and then adjusted this model for advertised hourly pay to determine if and to what extent a propensity for men to select more remunerative tasks was evident and driving any observed gender pay gap. We additionally ran separate models using women’s advertised earnings relative to men’s as the dependent variable to examine task selection effects more directly. The fully adjusted models controlled for the human capital-related covariates, excluding household income and education which were balanced across genders. These models also tested for interactions between gender and each of the covariates by adding individual interaction terms to the adjusted model. To control for within-worker clustering, Huber-White standard error corrections were used in all models.

Cluster analysis

To explore the potential influence of any residual task heterogeneity and gender preference for specific task type as the cause of the gender pay gap, we use K-means clustering analysis (seed = 0) to categorize the types of tasks into clusters based on the descriptions that workers use to choose the tasks they perform. We excluded from this clustering any tasks which contained certain gendered words (such as “male”, “female”, etc.) and any tasks which had fewer than 30 respondents. We stripped out all punctuation, symbols and digits from the titles, so as to remove any reference to estimated compensation or duration. The features we clustered on were the presence or absence of 5,140 distinct words that appeared across all titles. We then present the distribution of tasks across these clusters as well as average pay by gender and the gender pay gap within each cluster.

The demographics of the analytic sample are presented in Table 1 . Men and women completed comparable numbers of tasks during the study period; 2,396,978 (48.6%) for men and 2,539,229 (51.4%) for women.

In Table 2 we measure the differences in remuneration between genders, and then decompose any observed pay gap into task completion speed, task selection, and then demographic and structural factors. Model 1 shows the unadjusted regression model of gender differences in estimated actual pay, and indicates that, on average, tasks completed by women paid 60 (10.5%) cents less per hour compared to tasks completed by men (t = 17.4, p < .0001), with the mean estimated actual pay across genders being $5.70 per hour.

*Model adjusted for race, marital status, number of children and task clusters as categorical covariates, and age, HIT acceptance speed, and number of HITs as continuous covariates.

In Model 2, adjusting for advertised hourly pay, the gender pay gap dropped to 46 cents indicating that 14 cents of the pay gap is attributable to gender differences in the selection of tasks (t = 8.6, p < .0001). Finally, after the inclusion of covariates and their interactions in Model 3, the gender pay differential was further attenuated to 32 cents (t = 6.7, p < .0001). The remaining 32 cent difference (56.6%) in earnings is inferred to be attributable to gender differences in HIT completion speed.

Task selection analyses

Although completion speed appears to account for a significant portion of the pay gap, of particular interest are gender differences in task selection. Beyond structural factors such as education, household composition and completion speed, task selection accounts for a meaningful portion of the gender pay gap. As a reminder, the pay rate and expected completion time are posted for every HIT, so why women would select less remunerative tasks on average than men do is an important question to explore. In the next section of the paper we perform a set of analyses to examine factors that could account for this observed gender difference in task selection.

Advertised hourly pay

To examine gender differences in task selection, we used linear regression to directly examine whether the advertised hourly pay differed for tasks accepted by male and female workers. We first ran a simple model ( Table 3 ; Model 3A) on the full dataset of 4.93 million HITs, with gender as the predictor and advertised hourly pay as the outcome including no other covariates. The unadjusted regression results (Model 4) shown in Table 3 , indicates that, summed across all clusters and demographic groups, tasks completed by women were advertised as paying 28 cents (95% CI: $0.25-$0.31) less per hour (5.8%) compared to tasks completed by men (t = 21.8, p < .0001).

*Models adjusted for race, marital status, number of children, and task clusters as categorical covariates, and age, HIT acceptance speed, and number of HITs as continuous covariates.

Model 5 examines whether the remuneration differences for tasks selected by men and women remains significant in the presence of multiple covariates included in the previous model and their interactions. The advertised pay differential for tasks selected by women compared to men was attenuated to 21 cents (4.3%), and remained statistically significant (t = 9.9, p < .0001). This estimate closely corresponded to the inferred influence of task selection reported in Table 2 . Tests of gender by covariate interactions were significant only in the cases of age and marital status; the pay differential in tasks selected by men and women decreased with age and was more pronounced among single versus currently or previously married women.

To further examine what factors may account for the observed gender differences in task selection we plotted the observed pay gap within demographic and other covariate groups. Table 4 shows the distribution of tasks completed by men and women, as well as mean earnings and the pay gap across all demographic groups, based on the advertised (not actual) hourly pay for HITs selected (hereafter referred to as “advertised hourly pay” and the “advertised pay gap”). The average task was advertised to pay $4.88 per hour (95% CI $4.69, $5.10).

The pattern across demographic characteristics shows that the advertised hourly pay gap between genders is pervasive. Notably, a significant advertised gender pay gap is evident in every level of each covariate considered in Table 4 , but more pronounced among some subgroups of workers. For example, the advertised pay gap was highest among the youngest workers ($0.31 per hour for workers age 18–29), and decreased linearly with age, declining to $0.13 per hour among workers age 60+. Advertised houry gender pay gaps were evident across all levels of education and income considered.

To further examine the potential influence of human capital factors on the advertised hourly pay gap, Table 5 presents the average advertised pay for selected tasks by level of experience on the CloudResearch platform. Workers were grouped into 4 experience levels, based on the number of prior HITs completed: Those who completed fewer than 100 HITs, between 100 and 500 HITs, between 500 and 1,000 HITs, and more than 1,000 HITs. A significant gender difference in advertised hourly pay was observed within each of these four experience groups. The advertised hourly pay for tasks selected by both male and female workers increased with experience, while the gender pay gap decreases. There was some evidence that male workers have more cumulative experience with the platform: 43% of male workers had the highest level of experience (previously completing 1,001–10,000 HITs) compared to only 33% of women.

Table 5 also explores the influence of task heterogeneity upon HIT selection and the gender gap in advertised hourly pay. K-means clustering was used to group HITs into 20 clusters initially based on the presence or absence of 5,140 distinct words appearing in HIT titles. Clusters with fewer than 50,000 completed tasks were then excluded from analysis. This resulted in 13 clusters which accounted for 94.3% of submitted work assignments (HITs).

The themes of all clusters as well as the average hourly advertised pay for men and women within each cluster are presented in the second panel of Table 5 . The clusters included categories such as Games, Decision making, Product evaluation, Psychology studies, and Short Surveys. We did not observe a gender preference for any of the clusters. Specifically, for every cluster, the proportion of males was no smaller than 46.6% (consistent with the slightly lower proportion of males on the platform, see Table 1 ) and no larger than 50.2%. As shown in Table 5 , the gender pay gap was observed within each of the clusters. These results suggest that residual task heterogeneity, a proxy for occupational segregation, is not likely to contribute to a gender pay gap in this market.

Task length was defined as the advertised estimated duration of a HIT. Table 6 presents the advertised hourly gender pay gaps for five categories of HIT length, which ranged from a few minutes to over 1 hour. Again, a significant advertised hourly gender pay gap was observed in each category.

Finally, we conducted additional supplementary analyses to determine if other plausible factors such as HIT timing could account for the gender pay gap. We explored temporal factors including hour of the day and day of the week. Each completed task was grouped based on the hour and day in which it was completed. A significant advertised gender pay gap was observed within each of the 24 hours of the day and for every day of the week demonstrating that HIT timing could not account for the observed gender gap (results available in Supplementary Materials).

In this study we examined the gender pay gap on an anonymous online platform across an 18-month period, during which close to five million tasks were completed by over 20,000 unique workers. Due to factors that are unique to the Mechanical Turk online marketplace–such as anonymity, self-selection into tasks, relative homogeneity of the tasks performed, and flexible work scheduling–we did not expect earnings to differ by gender on this platform. However, contrary to our expectations, a robust and persistent gender pay gap was observed.

The average estimated actual pay on MTurk over the course of the examined time period was $5.70 per hour, with the gender pay differential being 10.5%. Importantly, gig economy platforms differ from more traditional labor markets in that hourly pay largely depends on the speed with which tasks are completed. For this reason, an analysis of gender differences in actual earned pay will be affected by gender differences in task completion speed. Unfortunately, we were not able to directly measure the speed with which workers complete tasks and account for this factor in our analysis. This is because workers have the ability to accept multiple HITs at the same time and multiple HITs can sit dormant in a queue, waiting for workers to begin to work on them. Therefore, the actual time that many workers spend working on tasks is likely less than what is indicated in the metadata available. For this reason, the estimated average actual hourly rate of $5.70 is likely an underestimate and the gender gap in actual pay cannot be precisely measured. We infer however, by the residual gender pay gap after accounting for other factors, that as much as 57% (or $.32) of the pay differential may be attributable to task completion speed. There are multiple plausible explanations for gender differences in task completion speed. For example, women may be more meticulous at performing tasks and, thus, may take longer at completing them. There may also be a skill factor related to men’s greater experience on the platform (see Table 5 ), such that men may be faster on average at completing tasks than women.

However, our findings also revealed another component of a gender pay gap on this platform–gender differences in the selection of tasks based on their advertised pay. Because the speed with which workers complete tasks does not impact these estimates, we conducted extensive analyses to try to explain this gender gap and the reasons why women appear on average to be selecting tasks that pay less compared to men. These results pertaining to the advertised gender pay gap constitute the main focus of this study and the discussion that follows.

The overall advertised hourly pay was $4.88. The gender pay gap in the advertised hourly pay was $0.28, or 5.8% of the advertised pay. Once a gender earnings differential was observed based on advertised pay, we expected to fully explain it by controlling for key structural and individual-level covariates. The covariates that we examined included experience, age, income, education, family composition, race, number of children, task length, the speed of accepting a task, and thirteen types of subtasks. We additionally examined the time of day and day of the week as potential explanatory factors. Again, contrary to our expectations, we observed that the pay gap persisted even after these potential confounders were controlled for. Indeed, separate analyses that examined the advertised pay gap within each subcategory of the covariates showed that the pay gap is ubiquitous, and persisted within each of the ninety sub-groups examined. These findings allows us to rule out multiple mechanisms that are known drivers of the pay gap in traditional labor markets and other gig economy marketplaces. To our knowledge this is the only study that has observed a pay gap across such diverse categories of workers and conditions, in an anonymous marketplace, while simultaneously controlling for virtually all variables that are traditionally implicated as causes of the gender pay gap.

Individual-level factors

Individual-level factors such as parental status and family composition are a common source of the gender pay gap in traditional labor markets [ 15 ] . Single mothers have previously been shown to have lower reservation wages compared to other men and women [ 21 ]. In traditional labor markets lower reservation wages lead single mothers to be willing to accept lower-paying work, contributing to a larger gender pay gap in this group. This pattern may extend to gig economy markets, in which single mothers may look to online labor markets as a source of supplementary income to help take care of their children, potentially leading them to become less discriminating in their choice of tasks and more willing to work for lower pay. Since female MTurk workers are 20% more likely than men to have children (see Table 1 ), it was critical to examine whether the gender pay gap may be driven by factors associated with family composition.

An examination of the advertised gender pay gap among individuals who differed in their marital and parental status showed that while married workers and those with children are indeed willing to work for lower pay (suggesting that family circumstances do affect reservation wages and may thus affect the willingness of online workers to accept lower-paying online tasks), women’s hourly pay is consistently lower than men’s within both single and married subgroups of workers, and among workers who do and do not have children. Indeed, contrary to expectations, the advertised gender pay gap was highest among those workers who are single, and among those who do not have any children. This observation shows that it is not possible for parental and family status to account for the observed pay gap in the present study, since it is precisely among unmarried individuals and those without children that the largest pay gap is observed.

Age was another factor that we considered to potentially explain the gender pay gap. In the present sample, the hourly pay of older individuals is substantially lower than that of younger workers; and women on the platform are five years older on average compared to men (see Table 1 ). However, having examined the gender pay gap separately within five different age cohorts we found that the largest pay gap occurs in the two youngest cohort groups: those between 18 and 29, and between 30 and 39 years of age. These are also the largest cohorts, responsible for 64% of completed work in total.

Younger workers are also most likely to have never been married or to not have any children. Thus, taken together, the results of the subgroup analyses are consistent in showing that the largest pay gap does not emerge from factors relating to parental, family, or age-related person-level factors. Similar patterns were found for race, education, and income. Specifically, a significant gender pay gap was observed within each subgroup of every one of these variables, showing that person-level factors relating to demographics are not driving the pay gap on this platform.

Experience is a factor that has an influence on the pay gap in both traditional and gig economy labor markets [ 20 ] . As noted above, experienced workers may be faster and more efficient at completing tasks in this platform, but also potentially more savvy at selecting more remunerative tasks compared to less experienced workers if, for example, they are better at selecting tasks that will take less time to complete than estimated on the dashboard [ 20 ]. On MTurk, men are overall more experienced than women. However, experience does not account for the gender gap in advertised pay in the present study. Inexperienced workers comprise the vast majority of the Mechanical Turk workforce, accounting for 67% of all completed tasks (see Table 5 ). Yet within this inexperienced group, there is a consistent male earning advantage based on the advertised pay for tasks performed. Further, controlling for the effect of experience in our models has a minimal effect on attenuating the gender pay gap.

Another important source of the gender pay gap in both traditional and gig economy labor markets is task heterogeneity. In traditional labor markets men are disproportionately represented in lucrative fields, such as those in the tech sector [ 23 ]. While the workspace within MTurk is relatively homogeneous compared to the traditional labor market, there is still some variety in the kinds of tasks that are available, and men and women may have been expected to have preferences that influence choices among these.

To examine whether there is a gender preference for specific tasks, we systematically analyzed the textual descriptions of all tasks included in this study. These textual descriptions were available for all workers to examine on their dashboards, along with information about pay. The clustering algorithm revealed thirteen categories of tasks such as games, decision making, several different kinds of survey tasks, and psychology studies.We did not observe any evidence of gender preference for any of the task types. Within each of the thirteen clusters the distribution of tasks was approximately equally split between men and women. Thus, there is no evidence that women as a group have an overall preference for specific tasks compared to men. Critically, the gender pay gap was also observed within each one of these thirteen clusters.

Another potential source of heterogeneity is task length. Based on traditional labor markets, one plausible hypothesis about what may drive women’s preferences for specific tasks is that women may select tasks that differ in their duration. For example, women may be more likely to use the platform for supplemental income, while men may be more likely to work on HITs as their primary income source. Women may thus select shorter tasks relative to their male counterparts. If the shorter tasks pay less money, this would result in what appears to be a gender pay gap.

However, we did not observe gender differences in task selection based on task duration. For example, having divided tasks into their advertised length, the tasks are preferred equally by men and women. Furthermore, the shorter tasks’ hourly pay is substantially higher on average compared to longer tasks.

Additional evidence that scheduling factors do not drive the gender pay gap is that it was observed within all hourly and daily intervals (See S1 and S2 Tables in Appendix). These data are consistent with the results presented above regarding personal level factors, showing that the majority of male and female Mechanical Turk workers are single, young, and have no children. Thus, while in traditional labor markets task heterogeneity and labor segmentation is often driven by family and other life circumstances, the cohort examined in this study does not appear to be affected by these factors.

Practical implications of a gender pay gap on online platforms for social and behavioral science research

The present findings have important implications for online participant recruitment in the social and behavioral sciences, and also have theoretical implications for understanding the mechanisms that give rise to the gender pay gap. The last ten years have seen a revolution in data collection practices in the social and behavioral sciences, as laboratory-based data collection has slowly and steadily been moving online [ 16 , 24 ]. Mechanical Turk is by far the most widely used source of human participants online, with thousands of published peer-reviewed papers utilizing Mechanical Turk to recruit at least some of their human participants [ 25 ]. The present findings suggest both a challenge and an opportunity for researchers utilizing online platforms for participant recruitment. Our findings clearly reveal for the first time that sampling research participants on anonymous online platforms tends to produce gender pay inequities, and that this happens independent of demographics or type of task. While it is not clear from our findings what the exact cause of this inequity is, what is clear is that the online sampling environment produces similar gender pay inequities as those observed in other more traditional labor markets, after controlling for relevant covariates.

This finding is inherently surprising since many mechanisms that are known to produce the gender pay gap in traditional labor markets are not at play in online microtasks environments. Regardless of what the generative mechanisms of the gender pay gap on online microtask platforms might be, researchers may wish to consider whether changes in their sampling practices may produce more equitable pay outcomes. Unlike traditional labor markets, online data collection platforms have built-in tools that can allow researchers to easily fix gender pay inequities. Researchers can simply utilize gender quotas, for example, to fix the ratio of male and female participants that they recruit. These simple fixes in sampling practices will not only produce more equitable pay outcomes but are also most likely advantageous for reducing sampling bias due to gender being correlated with pay. Thus, while our results point to a ubiquitous discrepancy in pay between men and women on online microtask platforms, such inequities have relatively easy fixes on online gig economy marketplaces such as MTurk, compared to traditional labor markets where gender-based pay inequities have often remained intractable.

Other gig economy markets

As discussed in the introduction, a gender wage gap has been demonstrated on Uber, a gig economy transportation marketplace [ 20 ], where men earn approximately 7% more than women. However, unlike in the present study, the gender wage gap on Uber was fully explained by three factors; a) driving speed predicted higher wages, with men driving faster than women, b) men were more likely than women to drive in congested locations which resulted in better pay, c) experience working for Uber predicted higher wages, with men being more experienced. Thus, contrary to our findings, the gender wage gap in gig economy markets studied thus far are fully explained by task heterogeneity, experience, and task completion speed. To our knowledge, the results presented in the present study are the first to show that the gender wage gap can emerge independent of these factors.

Generalizability

Every labor market is characterized by a unique population of workers that are almost by definition not a representation of the general population outside of that labor market. Likewise, Mechanical Turk is characterized by a unique population of workers that is known to differ from the general population in several ways. Mechanical Turk workers are younger, better educated, less likely to be married or have children, less likely to be religious, and more likely to have a lower income compared to the general United States population [ 24 ]. The goal of the present study was not to uncover universal mechanisms that generate the gender pay gap across all labor markets and demographic groups. Rather, the goal was to examine a highly unique labor environment, characterized by factors that should make this labor market immune to the emergence of a gender pay gap.

Previous theories accounting for the pay gap have identified specific generating mechanisms relating to structural and personal factors, in addition to discrimination, as playing a role in the emergence of the gender pay gap. This study examined the work of over 20,000 individuals completing over 5 million tasks, under conditions where standard mechanisms that generate the gender pay gap have been controlled for. Nevertheless, a gender pay gap emerged in this environment, which cannot be accounted for by structural factors, demographic background, task preferences, or discrimination. Thus, these results reveal that the gender pay gap can emerge—in at least some labor markets—in which discrimination is absent and other key factors are accounted for. These results show that factors which have been identified to date as giving rise to the gender pay gap are not sufficient to explain the pay gap in at least some labor markets.

Potential mechanisms

While we cannot know from the results of this study what the actual mechanism is that generates the gender pay gap on online platforms, we suggest that it may be coming from outside of the platform. The particular characteristics of this labor market—such as anonymity, relative task homogeneity, and flexibility—suggest that, everything else being equal, women working in this platform have a greater propensity to choose less remunerative opportunities relative to men. It may be that these choices are driven by women having a lower reservation wage compared to men [ 21 , 26 ]. Previous research among student populations and in traditional labor markets has shown that women report lower pay or reward expectations than men [ 27 – 29 ]. Lower pay expectations among women are attributed to justifiable anticipation of differential returns to labor due to factors such as gender discrimination and/or a systematic psychological bias toward pessimism relative to an overly optimistic propensity among men [ 30 ].

Our results show that even if the bias of employers is removed by hiding the gender of workers as happens on MTurk, it seems that women may select lower paying opportunities themselves because their lower reservation wage influences the types of tasks they are willing to work on. It may be that women do this because cumulative experiences of pervasive discrimination lead women to undervalue their labor. In turn, women’s experiences with earning lower pay compared to men on traditional labor markets may lower women’s pay expectations on gig economy markets. Thus, consistent with these lowered expectations, women lower their reservation wages and may thus be more likely than men to settle for lower paying tasks.

More broadly, gender norms, psychological attributes, and non-cognitive skills, have recently become the subject of investigation as a potential source for the gender pay gap [ 3 ], and the present findings indicate the importance of such mechanisms being further explored, particularly in the context of task selection. More research will be required to explore the potential psychological and antecedent structural mechanisms underlying differential task selection and expectations of compensation for time spent on microtask platforms, with potential relevance to the gender pay gap in traditional labor markets as well. What these results do show is that pay discrepancies can emerge despite the absence of discrimination in at least some circumstances. These results should be of particular interest for researchers who may wish to see a more equitable online labor market for academic research, and also suggest that novel and heretofore unexplored mechanisms may be at play in generating these pay discrepancies.

A final note about framing: we are aware that explanations of the gender pay gap that invoke elements of women’s agency and, more specifically, “choices” risk both; a) diminishing or distracting from important structural factors, and b) “naturalizing” the status quo of gender inequality [ 30 ] . As Connor and Fiske (2019) argue, causal attributions for the gender pay gap to “unconstrained choices” by women, common as part of human capital explanations, may have the effect, intended or otherwise, of reinforcing system-justifying ideologies that serve to perpetuate inequality. By explicitly locating women’s economic decision making on the MTurk platform in the broader context of inegalitarian gender norms and labor market experiences outside of it (as above), we seek to distance our interpretation of our findings from implicit endorsement of traditional gender roles and economic arrangements and to promote further investigation of how the observed gender pay gap in this niche of the gig economy may reflect both broader gender inequalities and opportunities for structural remedies.

Supporting information

Funding statement.

The authors received no specific funding for this work.

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The words we use to talk about the gender pay gap

You've heard of the gender wage gap: the well-documented fact that women, on average, earn around 80 cents for every dollar a man makes (the gap is even bigger for women of color).

But in reading up on the pay gap, you've likely across other terms like "pay secrecy," "pay disparity" or "pay equity." So what does all this ancillary vocabulary mean when we talk about women in the workplace?

Pay disparity

We talk about "pay disparity" when we're referring to a difference in pay. The term made news recently when USA Today reported Michelle Williams earned less than 1% of Mark Wahlberg's reshoot fee for "All the Money in the World." In December, E! News host Catt Sadler said she was leaving the network because of a "massive disparity in pay" between herself and a male co-host.

"I learned that he wasn't just making a little more than I was," Sadler wrote in a blog post . "In fact, he was making close to double my salary for the past several years."

But "disparity" doesn't always signify an instance of discrimination, according to Ariane Hegewisch, study director at the Institute for Women's Policy Research. "Pay disparity can also be a kindergarten teacher earns $27,000 a year and a person working as a financial adviser in a bank earns $500,000."

Pay secrecy

According to a survey from the Institute of Women's Policy Research , 51% of women reported " the discussion of wage and salary information is either discouraged or prohibited." This is pay secrecy at work -- the practice that discourages -- or outright forbids -- talking about pay or discussing compensation with your colleagues.

"Pay secrecy is one of the things that contributes to pay discrimination and the wage gap," says Maya Raghu, director of workplace equality and senior counsel at the National Women's Law Center. "This is when you're in a job and your employer is saying, 'You can't ask about wages, you can't disclose them to each other and if you do you will be penalized,' -- and many times the penalties include being fired."

Pay transparency

Companies like Whole Foods and Buffer practice radical pay transparency, sharing salaries of everyone from vice presidents to entry-level employees.

"Pay transparency is sort of thinking more affirmatively about how to make it easier for people to find out about pay in their workplaces, as a way to avoid pay discrimination or uncover it," Raghu says. "So it could be things like banning employers from relying on someone's prior salary in setting a new salary for a job. It could mean requiring employers to provide a salary range or a minimum rate of pay at some point during the interview, so it equalizes that power imbalance and that information imbalance between a job applicant and an employer."

Buffer, a social media management company, takes transparency one step further, even publicly sharing the salary formula that calculates each worker's compensation.

There are multiple shades of pay transparency, Hegewisch says. In some workplaces, you're able to easily understand who makes what and why -- and, she emphasizes, that "why" is the most important part.

"It's an open conversation," she says. "You know where you fall and why you fall there."

The definition here is simple -- pay equity is when male and female employees receive equal pay for equal work.

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Gender Pay Gap

1 exploring the gender pay gap: causes, consequences, and solutions.

Introduction to the Gender Pay Gap: Understanding its basis and significance Pay inequality in the workplace, or what is also known as the gender pay gap, is generally the comparative measure of looking at the position of a woman in the workforce in terms of what she earns for a particular job. There has been […]

2 Unraveling the Complex Roots of the Gender Pay Gap in Modern Society

In the 1920s, women earned the right to vote. In the 1960s, women entered the workforce. In the 1970s, women had Roe vs. Wade passed. It’s 2017, and yet women still don’t get paid the same amount as men. The gender wage gap is a blatant act of sexism in which women get paid 80 […]

3 Tackling the Gender Pay Gap: A Fight for Equality and Fairness

Currently, female employees make 18% less per hour and 36% less per week than their comparable male colleagues, and, astoundingly, in many companies, there is also a bonus pattern that favors men. This is simply not acceptable. Women have the right to be paid equally to their male colleagues. The fact that there is a […]

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4 Unraveling the Mysteries of the Gender Pay Gap in the Modern Workforce

The gender wage gap has been, and still is, a persisting problem in the workforce. At this point in society, it is common knowledge that, on average, men have higher earnings than their women counterparts. A few studies are dissected and explained in this paper, showing why and how the wage gap even exists. The […]

5 The Illusory Gender Pay Gap in Political Knowledge

The Gender Pay Gap Debate: Why Women Prefer “Don’t Know” The Public’s general assumption is that most people don’t know much about politics. Much of prior research concludes that men know more about politics than women. Is the gender gap real? The two assigned articles are essentially the same: they wanted to find out if […]

Why the Gender Pay Gap Still Exists

Are today’s working women leaning in.

Posted August 23, 2023 | Reviewed by Lybi Ma

• The gender pay gap exists, women make less than men. One belief is women don’t negotiate for themselves.
• A new series of recently published studies suggests that the belief that women don’t lean in is wrong.
• What factors account for the pervasive gender gap in pay? Front and center is bias and discrimination.

Is there still a gender pay gap? The Pew Research Center estimates that women earn an average of 82 percent of what men are paid for comparable work. The pay gap between what men and women make is real. What are the reasons?

One belief is that men tend to get paid more because they are more likely than women to promote themselves and negotiate for higher pay. This idea that women, compared to men, don’t lean in and advocate for themselves was the topic of popular books by former Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg (2013), and Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (Babcock and Laschever, 2003). A new series of studies published in the Academy of Management Discoveries (Kray, Kennedy, and Lee, 2023) suggests that the stereotype that women don’t lean in and negotiate their salaries is wrong.

In this series of studies, women and men, both from the general population, as well as graduates with MBA degrees were asked how much they tried to negotiate higher initial salaries, and how much they asked for raises and promotions later in their careers. The results suggested that women actually engaged in more negotiation than men. Yet, analyses of salaries and career trajectories over time suggested that women were paid less than men (the well-known gender pay gap) and that they were more likely to be turned down for raises and promotions.

Moreover, when people were asked if they believed that part of the gender gap in wages was due to women not negotiating, a significant number of men, and women, believed that it was true (even though the research results debunked the women not leaning in stereotype). Interestingly, men, as opposed to women, were more likely to believe that women’s lack of negotiating led to the pay gap.

If the Gender Pay Gap Is Not Due to Women’s Lack of Negotiation, Why Does It Still Exist?

There may be some other reasons. Typically, women have greater responsibility for household duties, and women are more likely than men to take time out of their career progression to have and raise children. There is also some evidence that women may choose less lucrative career paths, in sectors that tend to be lower paying (for example, education and healthcare). However, the results of these new studies, and earlier research, suggest that simple discrimination and bias against women in the workforce is a primary reason.

What Are Some of the Reasons for Bias?

In positions of leadership , there is still a tendency to view the prototypical leader as a man, and one who has stereotypically masculine, agentic qualities, such as assertiveness , competitiveness, and dominance. Women, as a group, are less agentic and more communal – helpful, nurturing, and kind. In selecting leaders, there is a preference for more agentic qualities, and there is, in many organizations, a preference for a strongman leader.

One psychological reason that may both explain the false belief that women don’t lean in and negotiate for themselves, and may underpin continued gender discrimination in employment is the tendency toward blaming the victim. To rationalize why a pay gap exists, many employers may turn to the false beliefs that women don’t negotiate or stand up for themselves, that women will fall off of their career paths to raise children, or that women aren’t as competitive and high-achieving as men.

In any case, this research demonstrates that the gender pay gap is not because women don’t lean in!

Kray, L., Kennedy, J., & Lee, M. (2023). Now, Women Do Ask: A Call to Update Beliefs about the Gender Pay Gap. Academy of Management Discoveries , (ja).

Sandberg, S. & Scovell, N. (2013). Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead. Knopf.

Babcock, L., & Laschever, S. (2003). Women don't ask: Negotiation and the gender divide . Princeton University Press.

Ronald E. Riggio, Ph.D. , is the Henry R. Kravis Professor of Leadership and Organizational Psychology at Claremont McKenna College.

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Jennifer Lawrence’s Essay on Wage Inequality Is Anything but Unlikable

By Patricia Garcia

Late last year, leaked emails from the Sony hack revealed that Jennifer Lawrence (and costar Amy Adams ) made less money from their film American Hustle than their male counterparts. The 25-year-old actress, who has never been one to shy away from saying what’s on her mind , had remained quiet on the salary controversy. This morning, however, she tackled the wage gender gap in Hollywood with a new essay for the Lenny newsletter .

In her piece, “Why Do These Dudes Make More Than Me?” Lawrence explained that she initially hesitated to speak on this particular issue because she doesn’t like to join conversations that “feel like they’re trending” (Equal pay has, after all, been all the rage in Hollywood .) But, after realizing that with talk comes change, she finally decided to open up on her experience with wage inequality.

Lawrence begins by acknowledging that her problems are hard to relate to, but regardless of the size of her paycheck, she has suffered a gender bias . Not only did Lawrence make less than Bradley Cooper , Jeremy Renner, and Christian Bale for American Hustle , but as the highest-paid actress in the world, she’s also still trailing behind highest-earning actor, Robert Downey, Jr. (Downey, Jr. made $80 million, while Lawrence earned $52 million.) In her piece, she blames herself for being a poor negotiator and writes that the fear of seeming “difficult” and “spoiled” kept her from pushing for a better deal in the past. Lawrence ends the essay by saying that she’s tired of choosing to seem likable over getting what she deserves.

It’s almost funny that one of the world’s most popular movie stars was scared to come off as unlikable. This fear has been an issue many other powerful women have had to deal with in the past. Recall last year’s “ Ban Bossy ” campaign from Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who started the movement after saying she was tired of hearing the word being used as a derogatory term for decisive women. And who can forget the vitriol (and subsequent online threats) Emma Watson received after she proudly declared herself a feminist during her powerful U.N. speech .

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While words like bossy and feminist have long carried negative connotations, Lawrence’s essay also highlights other potentially problematic terms, such as difficult and spoiled . The actress referenced an instance when she offended a man by giving her opinion in a clear and “no-bullshit way.” “I’m over trying to find the ‘adorable’ way to state my opinion and still be likable!” she wrote. “Fuck that.”

The actress has since learned her lesson. This summer, Lawrence secured a deal for her upcoming film, Passengers , in which she makes considerably more money than her costar Chris Pratt . Lawrence’s negotiating feat, along with today’s Lenny essay, shows it’s important for an actress, especially America’s sweetheart, to say—curses and all—exactly what’s on her mind.

Watch Jennifer Lawrence nail the awkward interview.

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A pay gap is the difference between the earnings of one group and another. It’s usually referenced in the context of men’s wages versus women’s wages. But there are also pay gaps when measured by race and ethnicity, as well as sexuality and gender identity.

There are shorthands for the most stark differences among workers:

Gender pay gap: Men earn more than women.

Education pay gap: Those with college degrees earn more than those with lower educational attainment. 

Parent pay gap: For women, having children widens the wage gap, especially for those with higher education, according to a 2024 report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Racial pay gap: White and Asian workers earn more than Black, Hispanic, multiracial and Native American/Native Alaskan workers. 

LGBTQ+ gender or gender identity pay gap: The “typical worker” earns less than LGBTQ+ workers, especially trans men and women.

» MORE: Women’s history month report: Past financial barriers slow progress

Here’s a deeper look at the pay disparities outlined above.

What is the gender pay gap?

Women consistently bring home less money than men: In 2023, women earned 84 cents to every dollar men earned, according to a report by the Census Bureau released in 2024. And that gap hasn’t budged in about 20 years, according to Pew Research Center.

» MORE: These 10 cities have the highest minimum wage in the U.S.

Among men and women who worked full time, year-round in 2022, the national median earnings wage gap was $9,990, with men earning a median of $62,350 and women earning a median of $52,360.

» MORE: What is pay transparency and which states require it?

The wage gap widens when you look at each state individually. The states with the largest median wage gap between men and women include:

Utah: $25,028

New Hampshire: $18,821 

Washington: $18,757

Wyoming: $18,318

Massachusetts: $17,884 

The states where the smallest median wage gaps between men and women include:

Vermont: $7,459

New Mexico: $8.717

Nevada: $9,239

Arizona: $11,218

Maine: $11,273

» MORE: Smart Money podcast: Why moms face a pay penalty — and what to do about it

What is the gender pay gap in your state?

» MORE: 2024 cost of raising children report

Gender pay gap by education level

A gender pay gap also exists for women at lower levels of education. Among workers with less than a high school diploma, women earned $0.66 for every dollar earned by men, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office.

» MORE: Current unemployment rate

Here are the most recent median earnings differences by degree, according to gender, as compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Wage inequities are stark when broken down by race or ethnicity, Department of Labor data shows. When compared with every dollar earned by white workers:

Hispanic/Latino workers earn 73 cents.

Black workers earn 76 cents.

Native American/American Indian workers earn 77 cents.

Multiracial workers earn 81 cents.

Asian-Pacific Islander workers earn $1.12.

What is the gender racial wage gap?

The gender pay gap is exacerbated further by the racial wage gap, according to data by the Government Accountability Office. When compared with every dollar earned by white men:

Hispanic/Latina women earn 58 cents.

Black women earn 63 cents.

White women earn 79 cents.

Asian women earn 97 cents.

» MORE: What is the minimum wage?

What is the LGBTQ+ gender or gender identity pay gap?

Gender and gender identity among LGBTQ+ workers also tends to affect earnings, according to a 2021 analysis of salary data by the Human Rights Campaign. LGBTQ+ workers tend to earn 90 cents for every dollar a typical worker (as in, full-time private and public sector nonfarm workers). According to the Human Rights Campaign data, when compared with every dollar earned by a typical worker:

Men in the LGBTQ+ community earn 96 cents.

Women in the LGBTQ+ community earn 87 cents.

Nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid and two-spirit workers earn 70 cents.

Trans men earn 70 cents.

Trans women earn 60 cents.

» MORE: What is the minimum wage for tipped employees?

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images News via Getty Images)

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