Explaining the Gender Gap in Pay

By way of Fairer Science comes word of a Time magazine article about an ingenious new study by researchers at the University of Chicago and New York University. The study, which was just published in the Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy, seeks to uncover the root causes of the gender gap in pay by comparing the experiences and salaries of transgender men and women before and after they transitioned to the opposite sex.

Want to guess what the researchers found? According to the article in Time …

“Women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the study earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female, even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs earned an average of 1.5% more.” …

The men and women in the study had already gone to school and made their career choices. Some of them changed jobs after they transitioned, and some stayed in the same jobs. Some were out to their employers; others started completely new lives as members of the opposite sex. Regardless, the overall pattern was very clear: newly minted women were punished, and newly minted men got a little bump-up in pay.

Discuss.