Glassdoor Roundtable: Why Transparency Matters for Gender Pay Equity

With actors Charlize Theron and Jennifer Lawrence recently shining a light on gender pay gaps in Hollywood, and members of the U.S. women’s soccer team filing suit against the U.S. Soccer Federation for pay discrimination, a series of high-profile revelations have reignited the debate over gender pay equity. But what is often lost in these debates is the role of pay transparency. Without it there’d be little to debate—we simply wouldn’t know. Despite growing transparency online, information on pay and gender is still not widely available for most jobs today. And without it, pay gaps like those recently unearthed in Hollywood and sports often fly below the public radar, undetected for decades. Today, I’m happy to announce Glassdoor is hosting a roundtable discussion on gender pay equality and transparency in New York City. Featuring top political, athletic and business leaders (like former U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, World Cup soccer champion Megan Rapinoe, Gap Foundation president Dan Henkle, and many others), the roundtable is an opportunity to bring to light not just the fact that there is a pay gap but the areas we can collectively address to narrow that gap. The Pay Gap is Real During the past three decades, there has been a mountain of research by economists on gender pay differences. The overwhelming message from that literature is that although there has been progress toward male-female pay equality since the 1960s, there remains much to be done. In my own research, we’ve found a 24.1 percent overall pay gap between U.S. men and women who report their salaries on Glassdoor. Even after making an apples-to-apples comparison of men and women with the same education, experience, job title and employer, we still find men earn a statistically significant 5.4 percent higher salary than otherwise equal females—a finding that’s consistent with many previous academic studies using Census data. One of the big takeaways from this research is that the causes of the gender pay gap—and the solutions—are not simple. In my study we found the single biggest cause is the sorting of men and women into jobs and industries that pay differently. For a host of reasons, women on average work in lower paying jobs than men today. This factor alone explains 54 percent of the overall pay gap—the largest factor by far. Correcting this imbalance will not be easy. The different career paths taken by men and women often begin early in life, and are influenced by social norms, experiences in different college majors, the burden of family responsibilities, workplace expectations about negotiation and competitiveness, and more. Although empirical research cannot offer a complete answer for how to close the gender pay gap, it shows us where to look for solutions, and which policies are likely to do the most good. Improving Transparency When it comes to closing the gender pay gap, workplace transparency holds tremendous promise. Research shows that embracing pay transparency can help eliminate hard-to-justify gender pay gaps in the workplace. In some ways, this is common sense: It’s hard to get to the bottom of pay disparities without a common baseline of facts with which to inform the debate. The first step toward pay equity is raising awareness that the pay gap is real, and that pay transparency can play and essential role in closing it—arming us with information about the many underlying causes contributing to the divide. We invite you to join the conversation with us and do your part to help promote gender equity in the workplace.