Published on: April 23, 2025 at 5:56 pm
Women working full-time, year-round are paid 84% of what men are paid on average, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. What is the answer to closing the gender pay gap? The solution might not be simple but is within leaders’ reach.
Academy of Management Scholar Carol Kulik of the University of South Australia said that the answer is auditing the compensation system and monitoring disparities within it.
“Data on the pay gaps that have just been released in Australia are company-wide, and what you really need to do is dig down and say, ‘At what level do we start to see pay gaps?’” Kulik said. “That’s so important, because when men and women come into an organization, the pay gap might be really small, but there could be at some critical stage in the future—maybe it’s at the point where they’re getting promoted into that first layer of management where there was a bigger difference. “You have to know where the problem is in order for you to really address it,” she said.
Role segregation is a significant aspect of the issue.
“We know that one of the big problems leading to gender pay gaps is role segregation,” Kulik said. “And that’s a really important thing for organizations to look at: whether women are concentrated in roles that don’t pay very well, are there some barriers that are keeping them from getting into some of the high paid jobs?
“One of the common examples that we use here in Australia is forklift operator—it turns out they get paid pretty well,” she said. “And women rarely apply for those jobs, because many organizations will require that you already have a license before you’re even considered for the role, but if the organization says, ‘We’ll provide some training to help you to get that license,’ we get much more gender balance in applications.
“And then we see a narrower gender pay gaps, because women now have access to roles that are higher paid—so there’s a lot of factors to consider.”
A sample of Kulik’s AOM research findings:
- Keeping Older Workers Engaged
- Engage Me: The Mature-Age Worker and Stereotype Threat
- Aging Populations and Management
- Physical Environments and Employee Reactions: Effects of Stimulus-Screening Skills and Job Complexity
- Relations Between Situational Factors and the Comparative Referents Used by Employees
