Don't ask or tell: Pay secrecy policies in U.S. workplaces

The gender wage gap among health care workers across educational and occupational groups

Women perform 77% of health care jobs in the United States, but gender inequity within the health care sector harms women's compensation and advancement in health care jobs. Using data from 2003 to 2021 of the Annual Social and Economic Supplement of the Current Population Survey (CPS), we measured women's representation and the gender wage gap in health care jobs by educational level and occupational category. We found, descriptively, that women's representation in health care occupations has increased over time in occupations that require a master's or doctoral/professional degree (eg, physicians, therapists), while men's representation has increased slightly in nursing occupations (eg, registered nurses, LPNs/LVNs, aides, and assistants). The adjusted wage gap between women and men is the largest among workers in high-education health care (eg, physicians, advanced practitioners) but has decreased substantially over the last 20 years, while, descriptively, the gender wage gap has stagnated or grown larger in some lower education occupations. Our policy recommendations include gender equity reviews within health care organizations, prioritizing women managers, and realigning Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement policies to promote greater gender equity within and across health care occupations.

BB see: Transparency legislation and public discussions of wage inequality

Disparities in compensation persist between men and women. Wage transparency, which enables workers to compare their compensation to what others receive in their organization, can be an important tool for redressing specific intra-firm disparities tied to discriminatory processes. Drawing on newspaper reports about gender pay differentials, we provide the first analysis of whether a public disclosure of pay transparency corresponds to a shift in broader public discourse, as represented by news coverage. Thematic analysis of newspaper coverage of the gender pay gap in Britain before and after the high-profile release of BBC wage data in 2017 reveals a shift from choice-based explanations to those emphasizing structural inequality and discrimination. The findings suggest that wage transparency coupled with news media attention may not only identify inequitable pay in firms, but also work more broadly to create space to discuss discriminatory practices and redress for pay disparities.

What do government unions do? Public sector unions and nonunion wages, 1977-2015

In this article we investigate the connection between public sector union memberships and nonunion worker pay. We leverage nearly four decades of Current Population Survey (CPS) data on millions of U.S. workers to test whether public sector union density, measured at the state-level, is associated with higher average wages among unorganized workers. We find stable and substantively large positive effects of state-level public sector union strength on nonunion public sector workers' wages. These results are robust to the inclusion of a range of state-level controls, including GDP, average educational attainment, public sector size, and the strength of private sector unions. Analyses of public sector unions and nonunion private sector pay reveal a robust positive relationship - but one limited to women, revealing how occupational segregation interacts with pay-setting institutions to influence wage outcomes.