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Penn Study Documents Gender Pay Gap Among Stockbrokers

New published research by Janice Madden, professor of regional science, sociology and real estate at the University of Pennsylvania, shows that female stockbrokers can earn as much as 20 percent less than their male counterparts. “Stockbrokers are among the highest paid workers, yet they have the greatest gender inequality among all sales worker jobs,” Madden said.

Her paper “Performance-Support Bias and the Gender Pay Gap Among Stockbrokers” will appear in the June issue of Gender & Society { http://gas.sagepub.com/ a peer-reviewed journal}. The study is the first to show that bias can affect performance-based pay.

Madden reviewed data collected from two of the largest commercial brokerage houses in the U.S. Madden is the first researcher to gain access to this type of in-depth brokerage data. The firms provided Madden records on more than a billion individual customer account transactions that occurred from 1994 to 1996 as well as employment histories of brokers from each company. Nearly 90 percent of the employees were men.

At both firms, men and women were paid entirely by commission, using an algorithm that was the same for everyone and could not be changed by managers. Madden found that the women stockbrokers were not paid – or given raises -- based on subjective performance reviews by their managers.

The women brokers claimed the differences in their earnings stemmed from unequal treatment, stating that they were given less support than men and assigned inferior accounts. The brokerage houses blamed “sales capacities” for the disparity in pay. Madden, however, found there was no difference in the ability of women to make sales compared with their male colleagues.

“Stock brokerages are less hierarchical than most organizations in that they have a relatively small number of job levels,” Madden said. “Stockbrokers, in particular, are all in the same job — there’s no hierarchy — and their pay is based entirely on commissions generated from their sales of securities, not on supervisors’ more subjective evaluations of their performance.”

Overall the evidence points to the fact that the firms assigned women “inferior sales opportunities” in the first place. http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/news/penn-study-documents-gender-pay-gap
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Workers don't choose their industry in a vacuum. "Why do you think [male-dominated industries] are sex-segregated?" says Terry O'Neill, president of the National Organization for Women. "Very often women aren't welcome there." Real or perceived, discrimination in certain sectors could discourage women from seeking employment there. A dearth of role models might, in turn, influence the next generation of girls to gravitate toward lower-paying fields, creating an unfortunate cycle. Read more: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1983185,00.html#ixzz29b
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Women earned less than men in all 20 industries and 25 occupation groups surveyed by the Census Bureau in 2007 — even in fields in which their numbers are overwhelming. Female secretaries, for instance, earn just 83.4% as much as male ones. And those who pick male-dominated fields earn less than men too: female truck drivers, for instance, earn just 76.5% of the weekly pay of their male counterparts.

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Perhaps the most compelling — and potentially damning — data of all to suggest that gender has an influence comes from a 2008 study in which University of Chicago sociologist Kristen Schilt and NYU economist Matthew Wiswall examined the wage trajectories of people who underwent a sex change. Their results: even when controlling for factors like education, men who transitioned to women earned, on average, 32% less after the surgery. Women who became men, on the other hand, earned 1.5% more.same

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Yet no matter how you interpret the numbers, there are a few stubborn percentage points that can't be explained away. Economists and advocates alike speculate that these are the products of slippery factors like discrimination — conscious or not. A 2000 study, for instance, famously found that after symphony orchestras introduced blind auditions, requiring musicians to perform behind a screen, women became more likely to get the gig. "I think discrimination has declined," says Cornell's Blau. "But I'm not yet seeing or believing that it's been completely eliminated."

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