Gender Pay Gap in the Bureaucracy: Evidence from Massachusetts State Employees

• In Event: Gender and Decision-Making

Abstract

Who serves in the bureaucracy has an important implication for political representation and the quality of government services. A rich literature on representative bureaucracy explores to what extent the composition of public employees resembles the demographics of people they serve and which factors could increase the degree of descriptive representation in the bureaucracy. One important dimension in the discussion of diversity of bureaucrats is gender. In the US, almost 24 million people, 15% of the total workforce work in the public sector and women account for the majority of public employees. Although scholars have paid close attention to the gender pay gap in private sectors and driving forces behind it, relatively little research has examined the gender pay gap among public sector employees. Given that pay and promotion patterns have important consequences for who selects into and stays in the bureaucracy, it is critical to assess whether a similar gap in compensation and career path by gender exists among public employees.

To answer these questions, we use over 1.4 million observations of detailed individual-level data of public employees in the government of Massachusetts (MA) for the period 2010-2020, covering 162 state agencies across the executive, judicial and legislative branch. Besides information on each bureaucrat's earnings, this data includes details on their specific contract, including the location of their workplace, bargaining units, job titles, and type of employment (full-time/part-time employment and contractor/permanent staff). This allows us to control for important confounding variables between bureaucrats' gender and salary and to uncover heterogeneities in the gender pay gap. Additionally, MA is the state where women earn the highest average salaries among all 50 US states and is one of the leading states in terms of implementing progressive policies to promote gender equality. This implies that any gender pay gap we find in this paper would suggest a lower bound for gender pay gaps that may exist in other states.

We find that, after controlling for various observable characteristics such as union status, contract types, and job titles, female bureaucrats earn 2.7% less than their male counterparts who work in the same agency, despite the fact that public sector wages are mostly determined by fixed rates. We uncover that the gap is mostly driven by overtime pay which suggests that requiring flexibility about their working schedule could contribute to earning gaps by gender. We also find that there is significant variation in the gender pay gap by types and location of agencies: Women working at agencies responsible for public safety and security as well as transportation and public works face the largest pay gap, while there seems to exist a female wage premium for agencies focusing on labor and workforce development. Additionally, the negative pay gap is especially pronounced for bureaucrats located in rural counties, such as Franklin and Barnstable, while it is substantially smaller for public employees in urban areas, such as Middlesex, Suffolk and Worcester. Finally, we explore the effect of Bipartisan Pay Equity Legislation of 2016 that increased transparency in pay information and banned asking about salary history, policies that are touted as remedies against women's disadvantages in the job market, on the gender pay gap.

Authors

• Kyuwon Lee, New York University

• Elisa Maria Wirsching, New York University

• Hye Young You, New York University