A guest-post at the Freakonomics blog by John List and Uri Gneezy looks at an experiment they conducted to test their theory about the gender wage gap:
Scholars have long theorized about the reasons why women haven’t made faster progress in breaking through the glass ceiling. Personally, we think that much of it boils down to this: men and women have different preferences for competitiveness, and at least part of the wage gaps we see are a result of men and women responding differently to incentives.
Being experimentalists, we understood that without actual evidence, this was just a conjecture. Determined to test our idea in the field we launched a large-scale field experiment on Craigslist where we posted ads for an administrative assistant gig we needed to fill. The experiment was conducted with Jeff Flory and Andreas Leibbrandt as coauthors. We received responses from nearly 7,000 interested job seekers from cities all over the U.S.
After a job seeker touched base with us, we gave them more details on the way they’d be compensated. Then we asked them to provide some basic information if they wanted to be considered for the position. Half the job seekers were told that the job paid a flat $15 per hour. The other half were told they would be paid $12 an hour but they would compete with a co-worker for a $6 per hour bonus (so that both ads would pay workers an average of $15 per hour).
What’d we find? Women were 70% less likely than men to go after the job if it had the competitive pay scale.
The blog post is called “A Unified Theory of Why Women Earn Less”, but I don’t think it actually qualifies — if the experiment was repeated in different markets, it might well explain some of the difference, but I suspect that women’s choices of jobs that provide greater flexibility in hours and the specific fields that draw more female than male workers are probably greater influences on the overall employment and compensation picture.
