Gender Pay Gap Has Declined

A soon-to-be published UGA study says the gender pay gap, the difference between wages paid to women and to men, has declined more than earlier studies had suggested.

The paper was authored by Jeremy Reynolds, UGA sociology professor, and Jeffrey Wenger, a professor in the university's

The study differs from previous ones in allowing for patterns of behavior that often tend to distort the results of such surveys. In particular, people tend to understate the amount of money that other people make (these are called "proxy reports"), but exaggerate their own incomes. The latter is especially true of men ("self-reports").

Reynolds and Wenger explain how these factors--together with evolving differences over time in the relative number of reporting men and women--have concealed the degree to which the gender pay gap has shrunk.

"If you're going to make comparisons between groups," says Reynolds, "it becomes pretty questionable to combine proxy and self-reports without thinking about those differences."

The most salient finding of the paper is that the gender wage gap has shrunk to a difference of only six dollars per hour, much less than had been generally believed.

"We were surprised at how large these reporting effects were," says Wenger, "and that they were different for men and women."

Of course, six bucks an hour is still significant, but the findings of the study are, in fact, encouraging, since they suggest more progress has been made toward equality than would otherwise have been supposed.

The research will appear in the March 2012 issue of the journal Social Science Research.

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