The Role of Gender in Influencing the Perception of Fair Wages and Job Suitability in Italy

This article focuses on Italy and studies how people’s perceptions of fair wages and suitability for jobs depend on the gender of the future employees. Gender remains a key factor in unequal pay, largely due to associated stereotypes and expectations. According to the status construction theory, gender serves as a status characteristic, influencing performance expectations and reward allocation. These unequal expectations shape perceptions of fair pay, which are often reflected in behaviours like decisions about promotions and raises, perpetuating inequality. As the allocation of rewards tends to align with status expectations, individuals with lower status (such as women) are seen as deserving of lower earnings compared to similarly qualified individuals with higher status (such as men). This argument is tested in our article. Moreover, the article examines how perceptions of fair wages depend on the interaction between gender of the employees with other relevant individual characteristics such as one’s qualification and competence, and socio-demographic features including motherhood, ethnicity and social class. Although the perception of fair wages has been studied in the literature, this is one of the first studies to address Italy. For this purpose, we design a vignette experiment on 2000 respondents within a survey that is representative of Italian population. In the experiment, respondents evaluate candidates’ curriculum vitae for a job opportunity and assess their suitability and the pay for three occupations which can be defined as feminine (high school professor), gender-balanced (product manager), and masculine (business consultant).

The experiment is pre-registered and administered by Dynata in November 2024 as a part of a larger project. The presentation will provide the results of the experiment for the whole population of respondents and by specific subgroups such as female and male respondents.