HR professionals offer women better salaries when reminded of their role in reducing the gender pay gap

Giving Human Resources professionals simple messages about their role in promoting equality could help narrow the gender pay gap, according to research in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

HR specialists tended to offer male candidates a higher salary than female candidates in the new study. But when participants were reminded that they had a collective responsibility to reduce the gender pay gap, this difference disappeared.

"Norm messages that lead HR professionals to pay attention to more equitable behavior may be a way to reduce the gender pay gap that undervalues women's labor without placing the burden of change on women", the authors write.

The burden of change

Although the gender pay gap is gradually getting smaller, there are still major disparities in how much men and women are paid. In the UK, the most recent figures show that women in full-time employment earn 8.3% less than men on average.

Plenty of psychology research has attempted to identify the causes of, and solutions to, the gender pay gap. But much of this work has focused on what women themselves can do to improve their chances of getting paid well, effectively putting the onus on women to combat a systemic problem.

So in their new paper, Carolin Schuster from Leuphana University Lüneburg and colleagues instead studied the people who actually make decisions about salaries. The team asked more than 200 HR specialists to read a CV for a job candidate. The CV was identical for all participants, except for the gender of the candidate: their title was either given as "Mr M" or "Ms M".

Some participants who were given a female candidate's CV also read a short paragraph highlighting that it is a social norm for HR professionals to help tackle the pay gap. This stated that HR specialists have recently begun helping to reduce the gender pay gap by changing their behaviour to ensure equal treatment of men and women.

Finally, all participants learned that the candidate had asked for a salary of €44,000, and had to come back with a counteroffer. They also indicated the maximum salary that they would be willing to pay the candidate.

Working to a common goal

Schuster's team found that participants who had seen the man's résumé offered a significantly higher salary than those who had seen the woman's résumé without the message about social norms: male candidates were offered €39,251 and female candidates €38,097. (The maximum that participants were willing to pay was similar for both male and female candidates).

However, participants who had seen the social norm message alongside the female candidate's CV offered her a significantly higher salary. In fact, this intervention brought offers made to women in-line with those made to men, effectively eliminating the gender gap. The gender of the participants themselves didn't influence any of these effects.

In a second study, the team again found that HR professionals offered female candidates a higher salary after reading the social norm message. In contrast, an "awareness" message, which mentioned the gender pay gap without explicitly stating that HR workers' behaviour helps to combat it, had more ambiguous results, raising pay offers but not significantly so.

The researchers also found that after reading the social norm message, participants felt more strongly that they were working towards a common goal of reducing the gender pay gap, and this could help to explain why they offered the candidate more money.

Unintended consequences?

In this second study, some participants given the man's CV also read the social norm message. And this produced a surprising result: these participants offered male candidates a lower salary compared to those who had read the man's CV without the social norm message. This effectively reversed the gender pay gap, with men getting offered less than women.

However, this effect could be down to the design of the study. Each participant only dealt with a single candidate, and so the only way they could attempt to reduce the gender pay gap was to offer a higher-than-usual salary to a woman or a lower-than-usual salary to a man. In the real world, HR professionals won't be making decisions in isolation like this – so would hopefully make decisions that would better lead to pay equality.

This unexpected result aside, the results suggest that a really simple message about the role played by HR professionals in helping to reduce the gender pay gap can boost pay offers to women. These messages seem to work by establishing a sense that HR professionals are part of a group with a common goal of working towards equality.

It remains to be seen whether this intervention works outside of the lab, and it's unclear when in the process HR professionals need to see these messages or how long their effects last. But if they do work in real world hiring processes, they could help narrow a gap that current estimates suggest will take more than a century to close.