Women Earn Less After Graduation: Study

A new study found that female graduates earn 7% less than males when entering the workforce.

A new study confirms what you may already suspect: female college graduates earn significantly less than males in their first jobs.

Females were found to earn 82 cents to every dollar that males earned in their first full-time jobs, CNNMoney reported. The findings came from the American Association of University Women, which sifted through a Department of Education survey that polled 15,000 graduates from the class of 2009 (the most recent data set from the DOE).

“You hear in the news that [millennial] women are now out-earning their male peers, but what we found in looking at those emerging from college is that there is still a gender pay gap,” Catherine Hill, the AAUW’s research director, told CNNMoney.

Even though a separate study earlier this year showed that women were more trusting and harder working employees, according to this report, women face a 7% pay gap. The report found that male business majors earned roughly $7,000 more than female business majors in their first year out of college.

The reason for the gap? The outlet reported that it could have something to do with industry trends. Men apparently pursue higher paying jobs, like engineering, more often than women do. The gap may also stem from men being more willing to negotiate a higher salary than women, the news site reported.

And women trying to start a business of their own won’t fare much better. As Inc. pointed out recently, female entrepreneurs start businesses with only 64% of the funds of their male entrepreneur counterparts. And women owners were much less likely to take outside funding in general.

read more