Model Text: “Wage Transparency and the Gender Divide”

Wage Transparency and the Gender Divide^[1]

Discussing salaries with neighbors and especially colleagues is often an unthinkable offense against social mores in the United States. Pay secrecy has long been the norm in most of Western society, but it comes with an information imbalance during any salary negotiations. Lately, wage transparency has gained some legal foothold at the national level as a tool to combat gender wage disparity for equal work. Is pay transparency an effective tool to close the gender pay gap, or will it only succeed in making colleagues uncomfortable?

States have been successively passing local laws to reinforce prior national legislation protecting employees’ rights to share salary information, and recent hacks have made information public involuntarily. In some situations, like in Norway, wage transparency has been the law for years. Norway also has the third smallest wage gap in the world. Compensation also has an impact on self-esteem and performance, so the wage gap could be causing a systematic decrease in self-worth for women in the workforce relative to their male counterparts. I plan to research whether increased wage transparency would cause a decrease in the gender pay gap.

There are many readily available statistics on the wage gap, although it may be difficult to avoid politically polarized sources. I’m not sure how available analytical studies of pay transparency will be, although sites like Glassdoor have published some admittedly self-serving studies. It will be difficult, although interesting, to assess the issue of pay transparency and the wage gap, as they are both complex sociological issues.

Teacher Takeaways “This student has chosen an interesting and focused topic for their inquiry-based research paper. I appreciate their anticipation of difficulties, too. Although I expect their understanding of the issue will evolve as they learn more about it, I would still encourage this author to spend some more time in this proposal hypothesizing about the connection between gender discrimination and pay secrecy; it’s not 100% clear to me how those important topics are related to each other. This is germane to my other major concern—that the student doesn’t appear to have done any research at this point. A couple of preliminary sources may provide guidance as the student wrestles with complex ideas.”– Professor Dawson