Setting Up the Gap, Gender Differences in Initial Salary Offers with Shiya Wang

In this seminar, Shiya Wang and her co-authors will present a study that overcomes this empirical challenge by obtaining data on more than 700,000 initial salary offers provided to job candidates in the United States from 2017 to 2020. This allows us to conduct the first investigation of initial salary offers in the literature. They hypothesize that a gender offer gap exists, and that it is higher in masculine-typed occupations than in feminine-typed occupations. Consistent with their arguments, they find a gender offer gap of 5.5%, net of detailed controls for job, employer, occupation, industry, location, and human capital characteristics. Additionally, they find suggestive evidence that the gender offer gap is higher in occupations with more masculine-typed tasks, compared to occupations with more feminine-typed tasks. They conclude with an exploration into how an understanding of the gender offer gap contributes to research on gender inequality, labor markets, and organizations.

Dr. Shiya Wang studies how and why gender differences in earnings and career trajectories arise, as well as interventions that could mitigate these inequalities. Her ongoing projects focus on the hiring process as a critical site for the production and reproduction of the gender wage gap. 

This seminar series will give participants an opportunity to engage with research that relates to the topics discussed in the book Make Work Fair. This virtual seminar is part of the Women and Public Policy Program's weekly spring seminar series: Make Work Fair. Attendance is open to all.