The persistent gender pay gap has been well documented for a number of years, with seemingly glacial progress towards equality being made.  Research from the University of Fribourg highlights how this gap can emerge even before students graduate from university.

The researchers examine the wage expectations of university students and find a clear gender divide evident across the 865 students they spoke to from a couple of Swiss universities.  The survey revealed that there were clear differences in salary expectations among the students, with women expecting to earn 9.7% less than their male peers immediately after graduating, and this rising to 11.6% three years after graduating.

Optimistic outlook

Despite this, when the researchers analyzed the expected wages with the actual wages of comparable graduates, it emerged that the students were pretty optimistic about their outlook.  Indeed, the expected wages of male graduates were 13% higher than the actual wages achieved by students.  For female graduates, the expectations exceeded reality by 11.2%.

What’s more, this gap between expectations and reality even seemed to widen when students were given actual gross income information, or at least they did for male students.  For women, the reverse occurred and students reduced their expected wages as a result.

The gap between expectations and reality fell after the inclusion of both personal and professional information, but there remained a significant distinction between male and female expectations regardless of the information each student received.

“Males typically forecast higher future earnings than females,” the researchers conclude. “We find that a broad set of personal and professional controls—collected in an own survey of two Swiss institutions of higher education—largely accounts for those gender differences in expectations across most empirical specifications.”