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Female Managers May Not Be the Agents of Change for Wage Equality

The gender-wage gap is more complex than we may think, as researchers find female managers are not the solution to the wage issues.

Researchers have found that female managers may not be the “agents of change” they were once thought to be in the struggle to decrease the gender-wage gap. In fact, Sameer B. Srivastava and Eliot L. Sherman write in their paper that they found “[i]n the subsample of high-performing supervisors and low-performing employees, women who switched from a male to a female supervisor had a lower salary in the following year than men who made the same switch.”

The study consisted of 1,701 full-time employees in the U.S. Srivastava and Sherman were granted access to the employment data (e.g., salary, reporting structure, annual performance evaluations, and demographic information) of a group of people who worked for a leading firm in the information services industry between 2005 and 2009.

Srivastava explains:

“A high-performing woman might, for example, worry about being devalued because of her association with a low-performing female subordinate. This might lead her to undervalue the subordinate’s contributions.”

Some believe that repairing the gender-wage gap is all a question of time, seeing the next generation’s gender-equal mindsets as the savior of this issue. While others believe reparations are the only solution. However, the gender-wage gap isn’t an issue just in the United States, many other progressive countries are working on solving this difficult problem. Saadia Zahidi, director of constituents at the World Economic Forum, discusses how it’s measured and how different countries are approaching the task of eliminating it:

Read more at EurekAlert!

Photo Credit: Shutterstock

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