Arbeitspapier
Closing the Gender Gap in Salary Increases: Evidence from a Field Experiment on Promoting Pay Equity
We present a natural field experiment on promoting pay equity through simple modifications to the salary review process involving 623 middle managers and 8,951 subordinate employees of a large technology firm. We first document a gender gap not only in salary levels but also in salary increases. Our treatments provide for a gender-blind reallocation of the salary increase budget available to middle managers aimed at promoting pay equity, along with different variants of a corresponding decision guidance. We show that the budget reallocation combined with an explicit decision guidance, while still leaving middle managers discretion in allocating the budget, can completely eliminate the gender gap in salary increases. The treatments also do not appear to undermine the desired performance differentiation in salary increases. We thus show that simple modifications to the salary review process can go a long way toward achieving pay equity by preventing gender gaps from widening throughout employees' careers.
- Language
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Englisch
- Bibliographic citation
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Series: IZA Discussion Papers ; No. 16278
- Classification
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Wirtschaft
Wage Level and Structure; Wage Differentials
Labor Discrimination
Personnel Economics: Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects
- Subject
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gender pay gap
pay equity
randomized controlled trial
salary structure
- Event
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Geistige Schöpfung
- (who)
-
Alfitian, Jakob
Deversi, Marvin
Sliwka, Dirk
- Event
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Veröffentlichung
- (who)
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Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
- (where)
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Bonn
- (when)
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2023
- Handle
- Last update
-
10.03.2025, 11:43 AM CET
Data provider
ZBW - Deutsche Zentralbibliothek für Wirtschaftswissenschaften - Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft. If you have any questions about the object, please contact the data provider.
Object type
- Arbeitspapier
Associated
- Alfitian, Jakob
- Deversi, Marvin
- Sliwka, Dirk
- Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)
Time of origin
- 2023
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