Les écarts de rémunération au recrutement des hommes et des femmes : une investigation en entreprise

The study provides new stylized facts on gender pay gaps based on individual pay data from a major French public financial institution, the Caisse des dépôts et consignations. The average gender pay gap there is 21,1% in 2019, which is close to the national average. Four-fifths of this gap exists at the hiring stage, where it is 16,9%. We implement decompositions of wages at hiring on a database that exhaustively covers three years of recruitment and that finely describes the characteristics of the job and of the individuals. We highlight the predominant role of the employment sector. A small number of sectors - digital, audit and risk management, investment and financial markets - are both the most male-dominated and the most lucrative. The hierarchical position also plays a role, with a greater representation of women in categories B and C, which pay less than category A. Finally, the status of employee also contributes to this state of affairs, as women are more numerous than men in public-sector jobs at CDC, where salaries are lower. The gender pay gap thus seems to be imposed on the company from outside by market forces and structural effects. By reviewing each of the stages of wage formation during recruitment, we analyze several sources of potential gender bias in individual pay negotiations.