要价差距在性别薪酬不平等中的作用

中文摘要

性别要价差距衡量的是女性所要求的薪资在多大程度上低于条件相当的男性。本文利用全职工程岗位在线招聘平台Hired.com的新颖数据，考察这一差距在产生工资不平等中的作用。求职者若要使用该平台，必须公布期望薪资，说明希望在下一份工作中获得多少薪酬。随后，企业仅依据求职者的简历和期望薪资向其发出申请，并给出竞价薪资。若求职者被录用，则会记录最终薪资。在控制简历特征后，要价差距为2.9%，竞价薪资差距为2.2%，最终录用薪资差距为1.4%。进一步控制期望薪资后，竞价薪资与最终薪资中残余的性别差距即被完全解释。为进一步提供期望薪资对竞价薪资具有因果效应的证据，本文利用了平台征集期望薪资方式的一次意外变化：2018年年中，部分求职者用于填写期望薪资的输入框由空白字段改为预先填入与其条件相似求职者的竞价薪资中位数。研究发现，这一变化使要价差距、竞价差距和最终录用薪资差距均降至零。此外，这一变化并未导致女性获得的竞价或最终录用通知少于男性，表明女性在要求与男性相当的薪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.