: Female graduates accept job offers faster than men — and for less money

Women earn nearly 10% less than men within their first year of employment, according to a survey of nearly 3,200 undergraduate students who graduated over the course of 2013 to 2019 at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. 

In some cases, the pay differences can be explained by industry choice, per the research that was authored by economists Patricia Cortés of the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, Laura Pilossoph, a researcher at the New York Federal Reserve, Jessica Pan of the National University of Singapore and Basit Zafar of the University of Michigan.

“Using survey data on risk preferences and beliefs about expected future earnings, we present empirical evidence that the patterns in job search can be partly explained by the higher levels of risk aversion displayed by women and the higher levels of overoptimism (and slower belief updating) displayed by men,” they wrote.

For instance, men who graduate from business school are more likely to work within the financial-services industry while women are more likely to work in marketing and/or retail-centric industries. 

Women could land higher-paying jobs if they play the “waiting game,” the researchers wrote.

There is, of course, no guarantee that they won’t get rejected from those jobs and end up wishing they accepted the job that was initially offered to them. 

Still, the research suggests that they end up earning more even if they don’t get hired until October post-graduation. 

Women have borne the brunt of the pandemic

These findings bear a lot of significance especially given that women have borne the brunt of the pandemic. Some 4.5 million women in the U.S. remain unemployed compared to 3.7 million men, according to the latest jobs report.

At the height of the pandemic, more than 11 million women were unemployed.

Many women are still unable to return to work in order to care for their children while many schools and daycare centers across the country aren’t fully open.

In fact, women ages 25-44 were almost three times as likely as men to not be working due to child-care demands, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Household Pulse Survey.

In some cases, moms were working extra hours to compensate for the lost wages of other working-age adults in the household.

However, 22 Republican-led states are cutting off jobless Americans from enhanced unemployment benefits in the coming weeks.

The governors of these states — which include Indiana, Texas and Ohio — claim that federal benefits such as the extra $300 a week federal unemployment benefit are keeping workers from applying for new jobs and are thus contributing to a labor shortage. 

Some jobless Americans who are set to lose upwards of $530 a week in unemployment benefits may find themselves rushing into a new job in order to make ends meet. 

That likely means they’ll accept lower-paying jobs than ones they may be offered later in the year, based on the latest research circulated by NBER.

The authors of that advise job hunters to take their time. “Our counterfactual exercises show that simple policies such as eliminating ‘exploding offers’ by allowing students to hold onto offers for an additional month, or providing them with accurate information about the labor market, can reduce the gender gap significantly.”