WOMEN NEED NINE years of experience to
reach the wage level that men anticipate
receiving upon graduation, according to
a new paper. Not only that, males expect
to earn an average salary of €49,000 (approximately
US$54,114) after nine years’
experience, whereas the maximum average
annual wage that women ever expect
to earn is €51,000 (US$56,322).
The paper was authored by Lukas
Kiessling of the Max Planck Institute for
Research on Collective Goods in Bonn,
Germany, and the University of Bonn;
Pia Pinger of the University of Cologne
in Germany; and Philipp Seegers and
Jan Bergerhoff, both of Maastricht University
in the Netherlands. They based
their paper on a study of 15,348 students
and 1,155 graduates.
The researchers found that most
women expect to earn less than their
male counterparts. The finding leads the
researchers to speculate that because
women expect lower wages, they leave
little scope for negotiation and receive
lower offers, whereas men enter negotiations
expecting higher salary offers.
Pinger proposes that offering
negotiation training could possibly
be a more effective way to reduce the
gender wage gap than policies that
encourage women to enter
male-dominated fields.
“Gender Differences inWage Expectations: Sorting,Children, and NegotiationStyles” was published online
in August 2019 as part of a
Discussion Paper Series
from the IZA Institute of
Labor Economics.