As snow turned to slush on a Saturday in late December, 12 strangers gathered at Glamour’s offices to take on a loaded issue: the gender pay gap. For two decades, Glamour’s Salary Survey has looked at what women in various fields earn across the country. But on this, its twentieth anniversary, we wanted to see how women’s pay compares to men’s. Are women really lagging behind?
So we asked 12 gutsy women and men in similar jobs, with similar titles and levels of experience, to come clean about their earnings. It wasn’t easy—most Americans would rather reveal their sex secrets than their salaries. But we found six pairs willing to be brave: two software engineers, two data analysts, two social media managers working in public relations, a duo in sales, a couple of cashiers, and a pair of graphic designers. All the participants wrote their salaries on large cards. Then we asked each pair—on the count of three—to flip their cards over.
“Boom,” said Simi, a sales executive, when she saw her counterpart’s salary. Kelli’s mouth froze for a split second before she laughed; Rose looked like she’d been punched in the face. In the silence afterward, you could feel the tension. Nurul, one of the data analysts, looked around at the cards. “Almost all of us women,” she remembers thinking, “have the lower salary.”
That may not be a huge surprise. The so-called gender wage gap has been making headlines for 50 years; corporate giants like Apple and IBM have pledged to address it; Ivanka Trump, at the Republican National Convention, even promised to fight for equal pay. The statistic widely cited is that women earn only 82 cents to a man’s dollar—a discrepancy that would make anyone angry. But when you’re looking at the black-and-white numbers of your salary compared to a man’s, as our volunteers did, this policy issue becomes suddenly very…personal.
But back to that 82 cents. Some critics of the whole pay-gap idea argue that the figure is misleading, and they have a point: It means simply that when you take the median annual earnings of Americans working full-time, women make only 82 percent of what men do, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that overarching average doesn’t account for the numbers of hours on the job, education, experience, the fact that women tend to work in lower-paying fields, and all kinds of other particulars that impact a person’s salary. “Some liberals are using this statistic to get across their political agenda of more regulation in the workplace,” charges one of the critics, Karin Agness Lips, founder of the Network of Enlightened Women, a group that promotes conservative ideas on college campuses.
Yet a number of detailed studies have recently proved there are glaring disparities in many occupations, especially in high-paying, male-dominated fields like finance, insurance, and medicine. One report, in the Journal of the Medical Association, found that female doctors at public medical schools with the same experience, volume of patients, and number of papers published made $20,000 (or 8 percent) less per year than their male counterparts. Other research, looking across professions, has found differences ranging from 9 percent to 2 percent. And just 2 percent can translate into a huge financial setback: For a woman earning today’s average wage, it would result in $59,000 in lost income over the course of her career—not to mention lower retirement and Social Security benefits. Even Lips agrees: “We all want equal pay for women.” So how do we get there?
Who Makes More?
Because the factors that go into a person’s salary are complicated, Glamour worked with Jamie Coakley, managing director of Betts Recruiting, one of the top-rated headhunting firms in New York City, to help us assess our pairs. Without meeting them, she drilled down to the details of each participant’s LinkedIn profile to say what she or he should make. “A recruiter’s favorite game,” Coakley says. (To be clear, although our pairs have similar professional backgrounds, and jobs, in the same geographical area, they are in no way a scientific sample. Also, Glamour has no reason to believe that any pay disparity exists between men and women at the separate companies they work for.)
Coakley started with Eric, 28, and Kelli, 25, graphic designers in marketing for different media companies. Coakley guessed that Eric was making more “because of tenure and the fact that he graduated two years before her.” She’s right. But when we shared the actual numbers—Eric’s $62,500 to Kelli’s $41,000, Coakley was taken aback. “[Kelli’s] seems really low,” she said. “She may just be underpaid.”
Next Coakley reviewed Lisa, 24, and Joseph, 25, software engineers at investment-related companies. Her prediction? “She went to an Ivy League,” Coakley said. “I would vote that she makes more.” Actually, Joseph does: $120,000 to Lisa’s $115,000, a salary she got only after negotiating up from an original offer of $80,000. (More on negotiating later.)
Coakley moved on to Danilo, 35, and Rose, 46, both responsible for media relations: he at an energy utility and she for tech clients at the PR agency where she’s a senior account specialist. “Just because of her five years at IBM and two years at CA Technologies, I would argue she makes a lot more,” said Coakley. “But I’m scared to hear your answer.” And here it is: Rose makes $70,000 and Danilo is at $114,000.
“Wow,” Coakley said. “You may be onto something.”
And finally, the data analysts—Nurul, 31, and Julian, 26. She’s at a financial services company and he works in the social media space. Coakley pointed to a number of reasons—experience, education, company tenure, a senior title—why Nurul should be making the higher salary. Again, no. Her $98,000 is $7,000 short of Julian’s $105,000. “What?” said Coakley. “She has her master’s! She worked a year in Malaysia.”
There were two more pairs: one paid by the hour with take-home about the same, and our last duo—the only case where the woman outearned the man. “This is making my blood boil,” said Coakley.
How the Pay Gap Starts
You might look at someone like Lisa and think: She’s 24, a software engineer with a six-figure salary; what’s the big deal if she earns $5,000 less than Joseph? Things will even out, right? Wrong. “The best knowledge we have now is that for a man and a woman who graduate from the same class of university and go into the same field, the wage gap right out the door for her is 7 percent,” says Ariane Hegewisch, program director for employment and earnings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington, D.C., think tank. “And that disadvantage is likely to grow every time she changes jobs because typically her new salary is based on her last one.” By the time a woman reaches her mid forties, the average pay gap has increased to 23 percent, according to government data. (To counter that trend, Massachusetts, in a first for the country, passed a law prohibiting employers from asking job candidates about their past salary.) Rose, who at 46 earns nearly 40 percent less than Danilo, regrets not advocating for herself more early on. “Women have to realize their worth and not be afraid to express it,” she says. “That’s my big takeaway.”
The Glass Ceiling Effect
Another reason the pay gap grows over time: Women face more challenges moving up the ladder, and when they do advance, says Hegewisch, “promotions don’t always come with the same payout as men’s.” In a survey of 1.8 million workers, and accounting for factors like experience, education, and company size, the salary site Payscale found that even after starting with similar titles, by age 35 to 40, men are 25 percent more likely than women to hold management roles and 85 more likely to be vice presidents or C-suite execs.
Tracy Chou, 29, a software engineer and cofounder of Project Include, which pushes for pay equity and diversity in the tech industry, says often the barriers are invisible. “Some companies will say, OK, men and women at this level are getting paid equal. The question then is, are they all given the same opportunities to change levels? I’ve seen this in engineering, because to move up, you have to work on the kind of projects that showcase your abilities, like managing complex systems and coordinating with other teams—and those assignments tend to go to people who fit the manager’s mental model of someone who’d be good, which is not always a woman.”
Chou, who helped Glamour with this project, first shook up Silicon Valley three years ago when she was a star at Pinterest and challenged other companies to release data on their numbers of women engineers (about 260 have so far). “A lot of it comes down to perception,” she says of the promotion gap. “I used to have stuffed animals at my desk because tech companies are playful. But I realized people didn’t take me seriously. So I replaced them with my circuit textbooks. Even though they were irrelevant, I started getting seen as being really hard-core.”
Lisa, our software engineer, agrees. “I totally do that, like bring Android security textbooks I would never read to my desk.” Adds Rose, “I’m actually going to point out what I don’t have on my desk: Pictures of my kids.” And that captures the gender pay gap’s biggest accelerant….
The Mommy Penalty
Rose and Danilo, our pair of social media specialists, have a lot in common. He was born in Ecuador and emigrated at age 10; she’s the daughter of Jewish parents who were forced out of Egypt. Both were among the first in their families to get college degrees. And both are parents: Danilo has a five-year-old son and another boy on the way, and Rose, who split from her husband four years ago, is also raising two boys, now 12 and 14, the younger of whom has special needs. “After my second son, I took about two years off, and even though I freelanced and networked and kept up on the industry, I felt like I had to start all over again,” she says. “Ten years ago, when I worked at major corporations, I was making more than I am now, but I had to take a step back into a smaller company closer to home.” She expected Danilo to make more than her $70K salary. “But seeing that actual number?” she says. “$114K? Like, what?”
All kinds of research shows that mothers take a wage hit. A study from the University of Massachusetts pegs it as a 4 percent penalty per child, with low-income women affected the most. That’s partly the result of time out and missed hours, according to research by Claudia Goldin, Ph.D., an economics professor at Harvard who followed women with M.B.A.s and found that even mothers who took short maternity leaves saw their wages decrease sharply three to four years after the birth of their first child. Other studies point to outright bias: When Cornell University researchers sent résumés for two fictitious applicants—equivalent in every way except that one was a mother—to 638 employers who’d posted job openings, the childless women received more than twice as many callbacks as the moms. In similar experiments, evaluators recommended salaries for mothers applying for positions at $11,000 less than for non-moms. Rose says she’s experienced that kind of attitude. “I’ve seen men in my industry move up and I haven’t, even though I was so much more qualified,” she says. “When I got pregnant, I was taken off projects, wasn’t included in meetings. It was incredible.”
Even more incredible? When men have kids, their earnings tend to increase. All three of the studies found a daddy bonus: Employers see fatherhood as a sign of stability, responsibility, and commitment, the researchers conclude—but don’t feel the same about motherhood. “I’m not even thinking about children,” Shadajah, a 23-year-old cashier at a beauty retailer, told the group. “I don’t have the money for that.”
Flexibility, Flexibility
Another key reason mothers’ salaries take a dip? The need to work from home or control their hours. In many professions, Goldin found in her research, employers place a premium on working at specific times and continuously (for example, paying a 70-hours-per-week employee more than twice what they would pay him or her to work 35 hours)—a key factor in today’s pay gap. “I want to be there for my daughter, who’s four, if I have to bring her to the doctor, but I make up all that time by working at night,” says Nurul, who performs her data analyst job from home. “And I don’t think companies should expect people to be there at a certain time, as long as the job is done.”
Shadajah needed flexibility because she’s going to school for an M.B.A., so she got a job that pays $12 an hour. Her counterpart, Aaron, makes about the same working the register at a busy café for $11 an hour plus tips, while trying to grow a food-truck business. Their side hustles may help them eventually earn a more livable pay. But for many women with low-wage jobs, “a pay gap can make the difference between living above and below the poverty line,” says Hegewisch. Shadajah can’t imagine life long-term like this. “To be on a cash grab for five, six hours a day standing on your feet,” she says, “something’s gotta give.”
The Color Barrier
Simi, 27, one of our sales executives, was born in Nigeria and went on to attend private school in the United States, study biomedical engineering in college, and start a foundation to design solar incubators for developing countries before landing her six-figure job at a large tech firm. (Somewhere in there she was also a beauty queen.) But like Shadajah, she’s statistically likely to face a bigger pay gap than her peers: African American women working full-time earn 12 percent less than their white counterparts, even with the same education—and make only 66 cents to every dollar white men earn, according to a report by the Economic Policy Institute. Hispanic women make even less—58 cents—government figures show. (Race affects men too; Hispanic males make 69 cents to the white male dollar. “I’ve felt a bias,” Danilo says. “Like if my name was Jim, maybe I would have a higher title.”)
“When people see this name on a résumé,” says Shadajah, “you can tell who I am. My professor, a woman of color, said, ‘Maybe you should put Dajah. Don’t put Bronx. Put New York.’ And it’s so unfortunate, you know. But I’m like, You’re gonna get me for me.” Simi is more pragmatic: “If you want to climb to the top, you kind of have to conform. That’s the way the world works.”
In fact, for young black women with college degrees, the wage gap has grown since 2000. “We tried to look at everything that could explain the difference—education, experience, location, occupation—but even considering all those factors, there’s a disparity,” says study author Valerie Wilson, Ph.D. “Every way we slice the data, discrimination is still there.”
Simi knew those stats before the salary showdown with her white male match, Tony. And he’s formidable. A year older, he works in sales at a tech platform. But when they flipped the cards, Simi’s number—a package worth about $140,000—trumped Tony’s at $120,000.
“Boom,” she said quietly.
“Curveball,” he said back.
The Way Forward
Simi’s success isn’t an accident; she has fought hard to get ahead and was willing to share her secret sauce with the others: “I worked with a negotiation coach,” she revealed. “In my previous job she helped me gain $20,000 on the initial offer; and in this one it was maybe $10,000. Hiring her was a really good investment.”
A new study in the Harvard Business Review shows that while women are 11 percent less likely to negotiate than men, when they choose to go for it, half the time they get a better offer; in our own poll of 300 women, 71 percent of the women who asked for a raise said they got it.
“My coach taught me that if you say, ‘I have great communication skills’ or ‘I’m a team player,’ nobody cares,” Simi says. “You need to tell a story, an anecdote of something specific you’ve done. She also said that if you start with small talk at the beginning of the negotiation conversation, you have a much better chance of being successful. Another big part of negotiation is asking for a lot of things that you don’t even want. Because they’ll go, ‘Fine. We won’t give you this, but we’ll give you that.’ ”
Lisa, the engineer, had her own story: “When I got my initial offer, I was like, ‘Ooh, I think they’re lowballing me.’ I scoured the Internet for advice and was super nervous. But the fact that I came in, a girl right out of college, and asked, ‘How many options will I get? What’s the strike price? How many total shares outstanding are fully diluted?’ I wasn’t even 100 percent sure what it all meant. But they were like, ‘Holy shit, we can’t mess with her now.’ And when they added $20,000 to my offer, it was a huge win. I was like, ‘Yes, I can do this!’ ”
Everyone in the room that day was fired up, agreeing that we have to talk more openly. “All the hesitation I had [about revealing my salary] was swept away because this is such an important conversation,” said Eric. Tony too: “I got a very tangible sense of what I don’t have to think about—class, gender—when I walk into the office. So now, how do I change it for other people? Talking about it definitely helps.” Nurul came away inspired by the other gutsy women. She went home and told her husband, “What if I say something at work [about a raise]? Are they going to fire me for being demanding? I don’t think so,” she recalls. “Lisa and Simi are much younger than me, and they had the courage to do this. To hear them? It was awesome.”
And Shadajah, who will graduate in June, is about to start her career with a whole new vision. “I’m so motivated,” she says. As a girl of six and seven, she revealed, she’d spent two years in a homeless shelter. “I used to think if I could just get $30,000, that would be the most money in the world. But to be in that room, seeing people who make six figures, and so young? It meant everything.” She pauses. “I really walked out with, It’s possible. And it’s possible for me.”
With reporting by Jessica Militare and Maggie Mertens
