Detecting salary discrimination against male and female managers

Abstract

This paper reports two experiments that examine factors influencing the detection of salary discrimination in organizations. Subjects were presented with information about the qualifications and salaries of female and male managers in 10 departments of an hypothetical company and were asked to judge the fairness of these salaries. It was hypothesized that the amount of information and the format in which it is presented influence fairness judgments. Moreover it was hypothesized that males and females differ in their fairness judgments. The two experiments corroborate these hypotheses. The results are interpreted in terms of two possible information processing biases: encoding bias and attributional bias.