The Role of the Ask Gap in Gender Pay Inequality.

This article examines the gender ask gap—the tendency of women to request lower salaries than comparable men—and its role in wage inequality using data from Hired.com, an online recruitment platform for full-time engineering jobs. Analyzing over 110,000 candidates, the study finds a 2.9% adjusted ask gap, which fully explains the 2.2% residual gender bid gap and the 1.4% final salary gap after controlling for résumé characteristics. A natural experiment on the platform, where candidates' ask salary fields were prefilled with median market salaries, eliminated these gaps by prompting women to ask for higher salaries without reducing their number of job bids or final offers. The findings suggest that women's initially lower salary demands stem from informational disadvantages rather than strategic behavior, and that increasing pay transparency can close gender wage gaps without penalizing women in the hiring process.