Mind the Gap: An Integrative Review of the Causes of the Gender Pay Gap

Abstract

The gender pay gap (GPG) is often discussed in policy, media, and across multiple academic literatures. Scholars of the GPG have focused significant attention on the causes and generated an extensive body of work revealing rich insights on why women tend to make less than men. But this literature is fragmented, and the sheer number of causes found in previous studies limits our ability to recognize the main reasons for the gap and move the literature forward toward solutions. We review the literature across fields, including economics, sociology, and applied psychology/management, and offer a unifying framework that identifies the main reasons for the GPG. Specifically, our framework organizes the GPG causes, and the theories used to explain such causes into four main perspectives: capital accumulation, bias and discrimination, sorting, and nature- and nurture-based differences. Our framework also explains how these perspectives are affected by the national and organizational contexts in which they are embedded. We then discuss gaps in the current literature exposed by our model that can be filled via novel theoretical, cross-disciplinary research, and by adopting different methodological and practical approaches. Overall, our review distills a large and diffuse literature into a clear framework to direct researchers toward theoretical insights and novel research questions that can get us closer to pay equality across genders.