Unequal Hiring Wages and their Impact on the Gender Pay Gap

Tho Pham, Daniel Schaefer and Carl Singleton
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Daniel Schäfer

No 2026-01, Economics working papers from Department of Economics, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria

Abstract: National payroll data reveal that men are paid more than women when they enter firms in Great Britain. Although this hiring wage gap has narrowed over the past two decades, it still accounts for over two-thirds of the steady-state gender pay gap – the wage gap that would eventually prevail under constant employment levels. We find that a significant amount of this hiring wage gap is not explained by men and women working in different firms and occupations. Even when a firm hires men and women into the same specific occupation at roughly the same time, and accounting for previous work experience, there remains an unexplained hiring wage gap within jobs that favours men by 2.4 log points. These findings suggest that gender pay gap reporting laws that focus exclusively on the overall gaps within employers miss an important margin.

Keywords: Gender segregation; Occupation-specific wages; Employer-employee data (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J31 J70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-01
Note: English
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Related works:
Working Paper: Unequal Hiring Wages and Their Impact on the Gender Pay Gap (2024)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jku:econwp:2026-01

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