Despite consistent government reports showing that women make less money than men in most occupations, and the drumbeat for equal pay on the presidential campaign trail, most people do not think there is a gender pay gap where they work, a new survey shows.
While the influence of millennials and technology, as well as a new federal proposal to boost pay transparency, may be eroding the secrecy shrouding salaries, some say a gap between perceived and actual pay remains an obstacle to parity.
Seventy percent of U.S. employees believe men and women are paid equally at their company, though women, at 60 percent, are far less likely to think so than men, at 78 percent, according to the survey from job review site Glassdoor.
That contradicts government data showing that women’s full-time weekly earnings are, on average, 82.5 percent of men’s, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ 2014 data, and it is not just because women gravitate to lower-paying professions. A gap exists across all age groups, education levels and a wide variety of industries: The median weekly full-time pay of a female lawyer is 83 percent that of a male lawyer; female education administrators earn 81.4 percent of men with the same title; women computer programmers make 86.6 percent as much as their male counterparts.
“There’s a disconnect in reality meeting perception,” said Scott Dobroski, career trends analyst at Glassdoor. “Employers are not communicating enough about their pay structure, and job seekers are either not researching pay information enough or (not) talking about it.”
To boost transparency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission at the end of January proposed requiring employers with at least 100 employees to report pay data to identify disparities and potential discrimination. The public would be able to see aggregate pay for job groups across industries and by gender, race and ethnicity. The data disclosures would start in September 2017.
Some companies already disclose employee salaries to foster trust — see the radical transparency at social media company Buffer, which has gone public with its salary formula and the thinking behind it plus the salaries of individual employees online for the world to see — but more commonly pay is kept under wraps either by company policies or the cultural taboo around discussing how much you make.
In a 2010 survey, nearly half of workers reported they were either contractually forbidden or strongly discouraged from discussing their pay with their colleagues, according to a report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the Rockefeller Survey of Economic Security.
Illinois is among about a dozen states with laws that protect employees from retaliation for disclosing, discussing or comparing pay. President Barack Obama issued an executive order in 2014 doing the same for federal contractors and subcontractors.
Technology is helping dispel the secrecy when company or government policies do not. Sites like Glassdoor.com, Salary.com and Payscale.com have made it easier for people to know the fair market value of their jobs, and a movement that launched last year on Twitter to get people to #talkpay led some to tweet out their compensation and experience level, so others can compare.
More than 90 percent of Americans say men and women should be paid equally for similar work and experience levels, according to the Glassdoor survey, which polled more than 8,000 employed adults in seven countries, including 2,000 in the U.S. When companies are perceived as not doing so, it could cost them talent, especially among women.
More than two-thirds of U.S. employees said they are not likely to apply where a pay gap exists between men and women for similar work, including 81 percent of women and 55 percent of men. Millennials are particularly sensitive to the topic: Among both men and women ages 18 to 24, 81 percent said they aren’t likely to apply to such a workplace.
The survey comes as another report out this week adds to the literature suggesting it behooves companies to have women in top positions. The working paper, from a collaboration between professional services firm EY and the Peterson Institute for International Economics, found that a profitable firm where women comprise 30 percent of the C-suite can boost profitability by 15 percent compared with an otherwise similar firm with no women leaders.
The study, which examined nearly 22,000 publicly traded companies in 91 countries, found no statistically observable impact on profitability from having a female CEO or female board members.
The impact of women in the workforce — and their pay — is top of mind as more women join the labor force. Last year, 55 percent of the 2.7 million jobs added to U.S. payrolls were filled by women, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. The number of women on payrolls has been rising steadily since the recession, and in January men held fewer than 2 million more jobs than women; before the recession, the gap was 3.6 million.
“It suggests a more permanent change than I thought (was happening) at the start of the recession,” said Heidi Hartmann, an economist and president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Historically, women have been more likely than men to opt out of working to take care of family responsibilities, so “it is interesting to see whether the roles will become more similar,” she said.
A pay gap can have a ripple effect. According to the National Women’s Law Center, a woman who works full time over a 40-year period loses about $435,000 in lifetime income, which translates to lower income from Social Security and pensions, and lower savings.
Reasons theorized for the pay gap are complex and include the absence of family-friendly workplace policies, job choice, discrimination and a reluctance to negotiate salary. In a PayScale survey of 31,000 people, 31 percent of women said they feel uncomfortable negotiating salary, compared with 23 percent of men. And among women MBAs who asked for a raise, 48 percent received what they requested, compared with 63 percent of male MBAs, the survey found.
According to the Glassdoor survey, 45 percent of U.S. respondents believe company policies around pay will improve the issue, while 39 percent named government legislation and 36 percent said clearer communication from senior leaders about how pay is determined would help close the gap. A third said sharing salaries for all roles would help.
But cutting through the taboo of talking pay remains a hurdle. According to a LinkedIn survey completed for The Washington Post last year, nearly 73 percent of workers said they aren’t comfortable with the idea of discussing pay with anyone at work other than their boss or human resources department.
Twitter @alexiaer
