The gap in pay between men and women is still a problem, as pointed out by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. People think sharing salary information could help. This means telling job seekers how much a job pays and what other similar jobs pay.

But a recent study from the University of Delaware’s Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics shows that this idea doesn’t always work perfectly. While sharing pay information can help reduce the gap in how much men and women are paid, it might not fix everything.

Gender pay gap

According to the Pew Research Center, women have been earning a bit more compared to men over the past 20 years. In 2002, women earned 80% of what men earned. In 2022, it went up to 82%. That’s a small improvement, but women might not find it very exciting. At this rate, it could take another 180 years to have equal pay.

To understand why this is happening, researchers did two studies. One looked at how men and women find out about salaries, and the other looked at how this affects how much money people ask for when negotiating a salary.

They found that men and women mostly look for salary information in similar ways. However, women tend to use websites like salary.com and glassdoor.com more, while men rely on talking to their classmates or colleagues. This could be because when talking to people they know, they might compare salaries and decide how much to ask for based on that.

“Men tend to search for information that allows them to kind of size themselves up … to compare themselves to others,” the researchers explain.

Thinking about masculinity

The way people think about masculinity affects how men negotiate, say the authors. Men are often told to be tough in negotiations and to stand up for themselves, especially when they find out that others are earning more money. So, negotiations are an area where men often want to show they are strong.

The researchers did a study with around 950 people, half of them men and half women. They all pretended to negotiate salaries for a job. They knew the salary range and what another worker was earning. The researchers split them into groups, including one where they didn’t get salary information.

Here’s what they found:

• In the group without salary information, men asked for almost $17,000 more than women on average.
• When people knew the other worker earned less or the same, both men and women asked for more money than the group without salary info. And the difference in pay between men and women got much smaller.
• But when they knew the other worker earned more, men asked for about $5,000 more than women. This difference was smaller than the first group but still there.

The researchers also found that men’s competitiveness was a big reason for these differences. This means that men wanting to compete can make salary fairness harder, even with salary information.