Research suggests women asking for raises, but men get them more
ONE COMMON theory to explain the pay gap between men and women assigns blame to women themselves: Maybe they just are not asking for raises.
But a study of Australian women has found that they were asking for salary increases as much as their male colleagues—men were just more likely to actually get one.
The study, released this month by the Cass Business School in London, the University of Warwick and the University of Wisconsin found that when comparing men and women who work similar hours, men got a raise 20 percent of the time they asked, compared with 16 percent for women. About 70 percent of men and women in the sample said they had asked for a raise.
Though the study did not offer solutions, Dr. Amanda Goodall, one of the study’s authors, said in an interview that it did narrow the possible explanations for the disparities.
“If we find that women are asking and aren’t getting the pay rises, it points the finger toward discrimination,” said Goodall, a senior lecturer in management at the Cass Business School.
The study also examined whether women were reticent about asking for a raise out of fear of upsetting their bosses. The data suggests not: While 14.6 percent of men said they had not tried to get a raise because they were concerned about workplace relationships, 12.9 percent of women said they had held back.
The pay gap between genders has been widely acknowledged, but identifying causes and solutions has long been the source of political and cultural debate. In the United States, President Barack Obama has attempted to crack down on the disparities, requiring ethnicity.
Women more often do not have the ability to negotiate at all. Forty-eight percent of men in the study said they were in jobs that allowed them to negotiate wages, while 33 percent of women said the same. And there were more women in part-time positions; the authors said part-time employees often feel less empowered to ask for raises.
But it is not all about different career paths for women; previous data show pay differences between men and women vary within occupations.
The authors of the new study did find some hope: Women under 40 were receiv- ing raises at a similar rate as their male colleagues. The challenge, Goodall said, will be watching whether the pay of those women continues to keep pace with their male colleagues’ as they climb to more senior ranks.
The study examined about 4,600 employees at 840 Australian workplaces in 2013 and 2014. About 64 percent were full-time employees, and the average age was 41. Just over half were married, and 86 percent primarily used English at home.
Though it is not an exact comparison to countries like the United States and Britain, Australia offers valuable data to the West based on its women having a similar pay gap and career mobility, Goodall said.
“We didn’t know how the numbers would come out,” Andrew Oswald, a professor of economics and behavioral science at the University of Warwick, said in a statement. “Having seen these findings, I think we have to accept that there is some element of pure discrimination against women.”