The Resume Paradox: Greater Language Differences, Smaller Pay Gaps
Joshua R. Minot Marc Maier Bradford Demarest Nicholas Cheney Christopher M. Danforth Peter Sheridan Dodds Morgan R. Frank
Over the past decade, the gender pay gap has remained steady with women
earning 84 cents for every dollar earned by men on average. Many studies
explain this gap through demand-side bias in the labor market represented
through employers' job postings. However, few studies analyze potential bias
from the worker supply-side. Here, we analyze the language in millions of US
workers' resumes to investigate how differences in workers' self-representation
by gender compare to differences in earnings. Across US occupations, language
differences between male and female resumes correspond to 11% of the variation
in gender pay gap. This suggests that females' resumes that are semantically
similar to males' resumes may have greater wage parity. However, surprisingly,
occupations with greater language differences between male and female resumes
have lower gender pay gaps. A doubling of the language difference between
female and male resumes results in an annual wage increase of $2,797 for the
average female worker. This result holds with controls for gender-biases of
resume text and we find that per-word bias poorly describes the variance in
wage gap. The results demonstrate that textual data and self-representation are
valuable factors for improving worker representations and understanding
employment inequities.