Gender may play a bigger role in salary across the board than once thought. A new study released by Bloomberg Businessweek refutes many of the factors once cited to explain away pay gaps between women and their male counterparts. On average, women graduating with MBAs this year reported an average $14,548 less in expected salary than their male classmates.
Bloomberg’s study focused on 9,965 students at 112 schools across the country, all graduating with MBAs. The survey is part of the media outlet’s biennial ranking of MBA programs.
Bloomberg’s report revealed some interesting factors related to the gender pay gap. While one of the reasons that women overall tend to earn less than males lies in the fact that many choose underpaying fields upon graduation, even in those fields, women earned less on average than men.
Bloomberg found that in 17 of the 22 industries that hired MBAs last year, women were offered less money. Here are just a few examples of the gaps by field:
- Finance – women earned on average $22,000 less than men
- Tech – women earned $12,300 less than men
- Consulting firms – women earned $11,500 less than men
Bloomberg’s survey also took into account some of the more predominate theories used to explain the gender pay gap. Those factors include selecting lower paying jobs, working fewer hours, having less experience in the industry when accepting jobs with an MBA and career interruptions related to family. The survey revealed the popular reasons to explain the gap don’t stand up to scrutiny.
To delve into the differences, Bloomberg limited its analysis to people who had full-time jobs lined up to ensure no gender difference in ability to commit to working a full-time day was present.
The pattern of less pay for women, however, held up even when circumstances were equal between men and women, researchers found.
Some of the telling points made by the survey in this regard include:
- Women who switched career fields into the consulting, tech or finance arenas, on average, earned $12,800 less than men who were also new to those fields.
- Women who were in one of those fields before graduate school and remained so afterwards earned about $13,300 less than men who followed the same path.
- Pay before graduate school was also examined as a way to explain the overall difference. When researchers controlled for pay before graduate school, the gender gap narrowed somewhat, but didn’t go away. On average, women made about $8,500 less than men after graduation regardless of their pay before starting school.
Regardless of the cause, Bloomberg’s survey shows that a gender gap between men and women still exists. That gap represents a significant loss in lifetime earning potential when the average differences in annual pay are considered.
“Our data suggest that employers pay certain people less not because of their reproductive choices or penchant for low-paying gigs, but because they are women,” researchers concluded.
