We examine preferences for gender diversity in high-profile jobs, using stated-choice experiments with more than 9,000 highly educated individuals in Germany. Across three distinct samples covering university students, Ph.D. students, and university professors, we uncover a substantial willingness-to-pay for gender diversity at the workplace of up to 5% of earnings on average. Women have a much higher willingness-to-pay for gender diversity compared to men across all samples. Our findings carry insights for why organizations with a high share of men in top positions may find it difficult to attract and retain top-talent women.

This paper provides the first time series of the gender pay ratio for full-time employees in Germany since the 1870s and compares Germany’s path with the Swedish and U.S. cases. The industrialization period yielded slow advances due to women’s delayed inclusion in industrial work. The first half of the 20th century exhibited a marked leap. In Germany, the gender pay ratio increased from 47% in 1913 to 58% in 1937. Similar increases are visible in Sweden and the United States. In all three countries, the interplay between increased women’s education and increased returns to education due to the expanding white-collar sector fueled pay convergence. Yet in Germany, women’s educational catch-up was slowed due to the dominance of on-the-job vocational training. German women’s migration from low-paid to higher-paid jobs was predominantly increasing the pay ratio. The postwar period brought diverging developments due to different economic conditions and policy action.

Against the backdrop of persisting wage inequality between men and women in Western societies, we investigate what people believe about wages. Using a factorial vignette design, we explore two aspects: "What are people's beliefs about the gender wage gap?" i.e., perceptions of gendered pay, and "Do women and men have different beliefs about wages," i.e., gendered perceptions of pay.

Preliminary results on HR managers reveal interesting patterns. First, HR managers expect a gender wage gap of around 7%, aligning with Germany's adjusted gender gap. Furthermore, respondents believe that female workers have lower returns to high work performance than men, as well as lower returns to certain occupations.

Second, we show that female and male respondents have different beliefs about wages. Female HR managers expect lower wages overall, and gender differences emerge in expected returns on professional decisions, like part-time work or self-employment.

Young women in the workforce are more likely to experience a loss of earnings than young men, and this is often attributed to their decision to have children and take care of them. To better understand this gender gap, we analyse longitudinal tax data from Australia. Contrary to popular belief, having children explains at most 40 percent of the gap. Many women who experience a loss in earnings have not given birth to a new child. Instead, economic factors such as earnings level contribute to more than 50 percent of the gender gap. Moreover, low-earning women are especially vulnerable to earnings shocks. In a simulation exercise, we found that if men had the same impact of having children as women do, they would experience earnings loss twice as often.