Women’s expectations, on average, are 7% below the median salary required for a senior position. In contrast, the expectations of men are 9% higher for the same position. This means that while women request a lower remuneration for a senior position, men request a higher one.
We can explain this difference based on different scenarios: 1) that women within the platform are applying for positions in categories between junior and senior, and men aspire to higher categories, from senior to superior or boss; 2) that women and men are applying to the same categories, but women have a lower perception or evaluation of the position than men.
To understand which of these theories has more weight, we analyze this data by areas and hierarchies. We found that both in the masculinized areas, such as Systems, and the feminized ones, such as Communication, the gap is 21% in senior positions; while in junior positions the difference is 5%. This means that the percentage variation between salary expectations increases as one grows in the hierarchical scale. We could say that the salary gap can also be explained by the difference in the perception of how much is the value of a certain position.
At Grow, we believe that employer organizations play a fundamental role in preventing this perception gap from becoming a real gap. In the first place, they could define a range of salaries, whose variations do not depend on what each person intends, but on the specific objectives achieved. Second, they should continually measure these gaps to detect inadvertent deviations. Companies like Reddit, already in 2015, implemented salary non-negotiation policies at the time of selection: on the one hand to be transparent (they publish salaries in searches), and on the other, to reduce the salary gap.
Co-founder and partner of Grow, gender and work, www.generoytrabajo.com
Source: Ambito
