{"id":3943,"date":"2025-04-23T19:37:24","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T19:37:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aomtodayprod.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=3943"},"modified":"2025-07-09T15:38:22","modified_gmt":"2025-07-09T15:38:22","slug":"the-gender-pay-gap-gets-worse-over-employees-careers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aom.org\/today\/the-gender-pay-gap-gets-worse-over-employees-careers\/","title":{"rendered":"The Gender Pay Gap Gets Worse Over Employees\u2019 Careers"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Daniel Butcher<\/a><\/p>\r\n

The gender pay gap between the earnings of male and female business professionals starts small on average but tends to grow over time.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so interesting that when we look at pay gaps among male and female MBA graduates coming out of the same program in the same year, the gap is so small; it\u2019s really little initially,\u201d said Academy of Management Scholar Carol Kulik<\/a> of the University of South Australia. \u201cBut the problem is, it gets bigger every year, because the way we usually get people pay raises is we make it a percentage of their past salary, and so any sort of pay gap that you have in the first year after graduation gets a little wider, year after year.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cAnd women are still primarily responsible for caring for children and elderly family members,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd so they have these career gaps, where they step off the career ladder for a bit, and when they come back, they never quite catch up on the pay raises that the men in their cohort have gotten.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cBy the time they get into executive roles, this gap can actually be really wide.\u201d<\/p>\r\n

Taking a step back, Kulik said that it\u2019s important for leaders to recognize that there are gender pay gaps, even at the highest levels of organizations.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cFrom the public\u2019s perspective, they say, \u2018These are women at the top of their game, and companies are under so much pressure to hire women and have women represented in senior roles; surely, they can just negotiate a higher wage,\u2019\u201d Kulik said. \u201cBut you\u2019re talking gaps of 20%\u2014that\u2019s a big ask when you\u2019re going into one of these senior roles.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cI want to emphasize that the gap is big, and it\u2019s really important to talk about it, especially because in executive roles, a lot of times the biggest part of your salary is not in the base salary; rather, it\u2019s in all the discretionary bonuses that you get for good performance,\u201d she said.<\/p>\r\n

\u201cThe higher you get in an organization, the more subjective performance evaluations are, so it\u2019s harder to tell when you\u2019re a high-performer, and so we tend to see very big gender pay gaps among senior executives.\u201d<\/p>\r\n\r\n

A sample of Kulik\u2019s AOM research findings:<\/strong><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n