Abstract
One common explanation for the gender wage gap is that women and men have different negotiation behaviors in labor markets. Yet, scholars also suggest that the gender wage gap reflects differences in initial salary offers provided to women and men that vary apart from negotiations. A challenge in parsing these explanations has been that salaries, not salary offers, have been studied previously by researchers. In this study we use proprietary data on nearly 300,000 initial salary offers from thousands of employers to job candidates in the U.S. from 2017 to 2020. We do so to provide the first wide-scale investigation of initial salary offers in the literature. Our analyses yield three main findings. First, we find a statistically significant female disadvantage with respect to initial salary offers from employers. Second, we find systematic gender differences in initial salary offers across occupations and job candidate characteristics such as their years of work experience. Third, using U.S. Census data and within the constraints we discuss, we find a positive relationship between the gender gap in initial salary offers and the documented gender gap in post-hire wages for most occupations. Our analyses reveal that during hiring a gender offer gap likely contributes to persistent salary differences between women and men.