Let's Hope We Hire a Female. So We Can Pay Her Less

Between late 2014 and early 2015, the CVs of sixteen senior candidates were submitted to more than 300 students registered at the Bocconi Experimental Laboratory for the Social Sciences. They didn't know they were part of a study that was conducted to verify if and how gender affects the hiring process. The experiment was designed by Paola Profeta, coordinator of the Dondena Gender Initiative at the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy, with Ian Ross Macmillan, full professor of Sociology at Bocconi, and Giulia Ferrari, researcher at the Dondena Centre.

Students were split into two groups. Half of them were asked to answer a few questions and tell if each candidate deserved a career advancement and what salary was appropriate. The other half analyzed the same CVs, but the gender of the candidates was inverted: male instead of female and vice versa.

"We're still processing the data", Profeta says. "The early results show that there isn't a bias, yet gender is a significant factor when it comes to select a candidate. Level of education, professional experience and current position are treated differently depending on whether the candidate is a man or a woman. The gender effect is strong when it comes to decide the salary: women are offered a lower wage than men. It happens indifferently when the decision-maker is male or female. In the former case, the salary gap is wider".

The experiment is funded by the European Union and is part of a project by the Dondena Centre and the Italian Department for Equal Opportunities of the Italian Presidency of the Council of Ministers.