Preferences for Wage Discrimination against Women

This study demonstrates systematic bias against women in public perceptions of the fairness of wages. In nationally representative survey experiments across more than 70,000 individual vignettes posed to 4,500 respondents in three Central Asian countries, respondents were 13 percent more likely to say wages were “too high” when the randomly assigned person described in the vignette (subject) was a woman, and 34 percent more likely to say they were “too low” when the subject was a man. The pattern of bias favoring higher wages for men is statistically significant at conventional levels in all three countries, among both male and female respondents, and in each of the eight occupations studied. The results also demonstrate the presence of significant bias in favor or older workers, specifically for white-collar occupations, and the absence of this relationship for the blue-collar occupations included in the experiment. The findings reinforce the importance of bias as a contributing factor to the gender pay gap, and the value of equal pay regulations to prevent gender discrimination in wage setting.