Unequal Hiring Wages and Their Impact on the Gender Pay Gap

Citation

Pham T, Schaefer D & Singleton C (2026) Unequal Hiring Wages and Their Impact on the Gender Pay Gap. Economic Inquiry.

Abstract
Payroll data from Great Britain reveal that men are paid more than women upon entry into firms. Although this hiring wage gap has narrowed over the past two decades, it still accounts for over two-thirds of the steady-state gender pay gap-the wage gap that would eventually prevail under constant employment levels. A significant part of this hiring wage gap is not explained by men and women working in different firms and occupations. Even when hiring men and women into the same job, there remains an unexplained hiring wage gap that favours men by 2.4 log points.

Keywords
Gender segregation; Occupation-specific wages; Employer-employee data

Notes
We are grateful to Ren\'{e} B\"{o}heim, Alex Bryson, Sarah Jewell, Melanie Jones, Ezgi Kaya, Anja Prummer, Giovanni Razzu, Bernhard Schmidpeter, Nikolaos Theodoropoulos, as well as the co-editor Nicolas Ziebarth and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. This work is based on the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings Dataset and New Earnings Survey Panel Dataset (Crown copyright 2024), having been funded, collected, and deposited by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) under secure access conditions with the UK Data Service (SN:6689 and SN:6706). Neither the ONS nor the Data Service bear any responsibility for the analysis and discussion of the results in this paper. Singleton thanks the Economic and Social Research Council and Administrative Data Research UK for funding support of the Wage and Employment Dynamics project (ES/T013877/1).