Agreeing in principle, disagreeing on policy: How beliefs about the gender pay gap shape fairness concerns and policy preferences

Willingness to reduce gender inequalities partly depends on whether people are aware of them and consider them unfair. Extending scholarship centered on inequality misperceptions, we focus on beliefs about the sources of the gender pay gap (GPG), experimentally varying people's ability to attribute pay disparities to women's choices. Preregistered survey experiments in the U.S. and Germany show that information about larger (vs. smaller) and within-job (vs. overall) GPGs independently increases awareness, raises perceived unfairness, and translates into general support for government action. Initially less-supportive groups (conservatives, men) showed some of the largest increases in general support. Yet, updated beliefs did not increase support for specific policies, such as pay transparency laws or gender quotas. These findings suggest that information campaigns can affect beliefs about GPG's size and sources, but even perceiving GPGs as unfair does not bridge the gap between abstract commitment to gender equality and concrete policy support.