Informing about Gender Inequality: Beliefs about the Gender Wage Gap and Support for Gender Equality Policies

Gender inequality in pay is persisting in across Europe and in many other countries of the world (OECD, 2023). One mechanism for persisting gender pay inequality that has been proposed suggests that women are more content with their wages or perceive less wage injustice than men although they earn less (Crosby, 1982; Davison, 2014; Valet, 2018; Pfeifer and Stephan, 2019). However, recent studies suggest that women may have stopped to be fine with lower incomes in Europe (Adriaans and Targa, 2023; Brüggemann and Hinz, 2023). One of the potential mechanisms for this occurring change is that women became more aware of their unfairly low earnings as the topic of gender inequalities became more and more salient in public and political debates.

However, to date, we lack appropriate data to test whether the gender convergence of justice perceptions of wages is indeed driven increased awareness of the societal gender pay gap and what drives this effect. Following social justice theories and empirical evidence of prominence of equity norms in the labor market, we suggest that people will increase preferences for gender policies if made aware of existing gender wage gaps. This effect is expected to be larger if wage gaps are adjusted than if they are unadjusted because individuals’ sense of equity should be hurt more.

We address these gaps with a preregistered cross-national information provision experiment in which we inform participants about gender inequality in pay in their country context and vary the type of information presented (unadjusted vs. adjusted gender pay gaps). If information provision can increase support for gender equality policies, this would suggest that further attempts to inform the public about gender pay gaps (both unadjusted and adjusted) would be encouraged to increase the public support for policies that tackle persisting gender pay differences.