Pay Gap Persists for Female Undergraduates and MBA’s
It’s graduation season. And those lucky graduates who have landed jobs, may have some disappointing news if they are female. The wage gap is alive and well.
In a study from the National Association of Colleges and Employers in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania released last week female graduates earn 17% less in their first job than their fellow students.
In “Gender and College Recruiting” that appeared in the April 2011 issue of the NACE Journal, Ed Koc, NACE director of research reports that the average starting salary to a Class of 2010 new female graduate at the bachelor’s level was $36,451—17% less than the $44,159 her male counterpart averaged.
Further, says Mr. Koc, the discrepancy can’t be explained as a result of men choosing majors that lead to higher-paying jobs. Even when salary is adjusted by major, men come out ahead in most cases, the exception being engineering.
And the discrepancy isn’t strictly confined to the undergraduate level. In new research Catalyst found that women MBA graduates earn on average $4,600 less than men in their first job out of school. This was after the number of years of prior experience, job level, global region, industry and parenthood were taken into account.
Catalyst also found that even if a woman had a mentor, mentoring benefits men more. Men with mentors received over $9,000 more in the first post-MBA job than women with mentors.
Men got more promotions than did women, (taking those same variables into account) and men’s salary outpaced that of women, thus perpetuating the gender gap established off the bat in the first job. The study found that each promotion in 2008 amounted to an extra 21% in compensation for men. The additional compensation amount for promoted women was an extra 2%.
Over the lifetime of a 40 year career the typical women loses over $430,000 in pay. Why?
Tags: college graduates, difference in lifetime earnings, employee attitudes, gender parity, M.B.A. first jobs, pay equity
