中文摘要
性别索薪差距衡量的是女性要求的薪资低于条件相当男性的程度。本文使用全职工程类职位在线招聘平台 Hired.com 的新颖数据，研究性别索薪差距在造成工资不平等中的作用。为使用该平台，求职者必须发布期望薪资，说明其希望在下一份工作中获得多少薪资。随后，企业仅根据求职者的简历和期望薪资向其发出申请，并给出报价薪资。如果求职者获聘，平台会记录最终薪资。在对简历特征进行调整后，期望薪资的性别差距为2.9%，报价薪资的性别差距为2.2%，最终报价的性别差距为1.4%。进一步控制期望薪资后，报价薪资和最终薪资中剩余的性别差距得到完全解释。为进一步提供期望薪资对报价薪资具有因果效应的证据，我利用了平台提示求职者填写期望薪资的方式发生的一次意外变化。对于2018年年中的部分求职者，用于征询期望薪资的作答框由空白栏改为预先填入与其相似求职者所获报价薪资中位数的条目。我发现，这一变化使期望薪资、报价薪资和最终报价的性别差距均降至零。此外，这一变化并未导致女性获得的报价或最终录用通知少于男性，这表明女性要求与男性相当的工资时几乎未受到惩罚。
Abstract
Abstract The gender ask gap measures the extent to which women ask for lower salaries than comparable men. This article studies its role in generating wage inequality, using novel data from an online recruitment platform for full-time engineering jobs: Hired.com. To use the platform, job candidates must post an ask salary, stating how much they want to make in their next job. Firms then apply to candidates by offering them a bid salary, solely based on the candidate’s résumé and ask salary. If the candidate is hired, a final salary is recorded. After adjusting for résumé characteristics, the ask gap is 2.9%, the bid gap is 2.2%, and the final offer gap is 1.4%. Further controlling for the ask salary explains the entirety of the residual gender gaps in bid and final salaries. To further provide evidence of the causal effect of the ask salary on the bid salary, I exploit an unanticipated change in how candidates were prompted to provide their ask. For some candidates in mid-2018, the answer box used to solicit the ask salary was changed from an empty field to an entry prefilled with the median bid salary for similar candidates. I find that this change drove the ask, bid, and final offer gaps to zero. In addition, women did not receive fewer bids or final offers than men did due to the change, suggesting they faced little penalty for demanding comparable wages.