Gender-Bias in Managers' Decision Regarding Pay-Raises”

In no country in the world today, women’s wages equal men’s. Scientists who investigated mechanism for the gender pay-gap have focused mainly on macro-level factors such as the over-representation of women in lowpaying jobs and different training of men and women. However, models attempting to explain the gender paygap with such factors reveal that a large proportion of the gap remains unexplained. In the current research we investigate micro-level processes. Specifically, we focus on decisions of managers regarding pay-raises. We report data from experiments conducted among male and female managers in Israel, who were randomly assigned to decide on a pay raise for either a male or a female employee. The managers indicated their support for two raise options, with one being significantly larger than the other. Results revealed that the higher raise was supported more by managers who rated the male (vs. the female) employee, while the lower raise was supported more by managers who rated the female (vs. the male) employee. Moreover, these effects were only apparent among male managers – female managers did not show the same bias in their pay-raise decisions. Psychological processes contributing to these effects, and their practical implications, are discussed