Setting Up the Gap? Gender Differences in Initial Salary Offers in Hiring

One common explanation for the gender wage gap is that women have less favorable negotiation outcomes than men in labor markets. Yet, women might also start out with lower offers upon which negotiations occur. A challenge in examining the latter explanation has been that salaries, not salary offers, have been previously available to researchers. In this study, we overcome this empirical challenge by obtaining data on more than 700,000 initial salary offers provided to job candidates in the United States from 2017 to 2020. This allows us to conduct the first wide-scale investigation of initial salary offers in the literature. We hypothesize that a gender offer gap exists and that it is larger in masculine-typed occupations than in feminine-typed occupations. Consistent with our arguments, we find a gender offer gap of 5.5%, net of detailed controls for job, employer, occupation, industry, location, and human capital characteristics. Additionally, we find suggestive evidence that the gender offer gap is larger in occupations with more masculine-typed tasks compared with occupations with more feminine-typed tasks. We close with a discussion of how an understanding of the gender offer gap contributes to research on gender inequality, labor markets, and organizations. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2023.17883 .