Women MBAs Make Less Than Male Counterparts Straight Out of Business School, Research Shows

Women make an average of $4,600 less per year in their first post-MBA jobs than men and the pay gap widens even more over time, according to research published in last month’s Harvard Business Review.

The research, by Nancy Carter and Christine Silva of Catalyst, was part of “Women in Management: Delusions of Progress,” an article in the March 2010 issue of HBR. Controlling for job level and industry as well as factors like having children or differing aspiration levels, Carter and Silva found that women trail men in every category, including job title, advancement and pay, at every career stage.

For a section in the March article, HBR caught up with Carter to discuss her findings and to better understand where the pay gap between men and women starts.

“We started looking at salary differential and then we found this discrepancy in why men and women leave first jobs,” Carter told HBR. Women, they discovered, were far more likely than men to leave their first job because of a bad manager. “That first job started to look much more important to us than we thought,” she continued.

Though their research didn’t show why they left – or why they were getting bad bosses – it did find that those leaving first jobs were averaging $4,600 lower pay. Because subsequent jobs are often linked to the salary one held at a previous position, the pay gap continued to widen from there.

Carter has spoken to many executives since the research was published,  and their responses have ranged from shock and disbelief to skepticism. “Most people recognize that it’s easy for things to happen midstream,” Carter told HBR, “but few of them believe that the first job could be a problem. It does seem like an easy place to address parity.”

Carter and Silva’s research does not uncover the source of the discrepancies in pay in the first job, and doing so has proven to be difficult, according to HBR. Based on conversations with executives who have reviewed the results, Carter speculates that it could be based on very subtle stereotypical biases that influence recruiters’ hiring decisions. 

One executive Carter talked to ordered his team to look at the resumes of the last 100 hirees and found discrepancies in pay between men and women, but he couldn’t determine where they had come from, according to the HBR article. But upon seeing the pay gap, he adjusted the women’s salaries on the spot, Carter told HBR.

“That was affirming,” Carter says, “to think people were going home with more money in their paycheck the next week based on this research.”

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