PHOTO: COURTESY OF NINA ROUSSILLE
Some economists have speculated that women are inherently worse at negotiating or fear they won’t get a job or promotion if they advocate for higher pay. Nina Roussille, the Gordon K. Lister and Donald K. Lister Career Development Assistant Professor of Economics, has a different explanation: They simply don’t know how much to ask for. “A lot of the story I’ve been trying to tell is about information—that misperceptions or incorrect beliefs or lack of information have played a big role in labor market inequality,” she says.
In a 2024 paper published in The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Roussille examines the so-called ask gap in gender pay inequality. Analyzing women’s salary requests for software engineer jobs on an online platform, she found that on average they asked for 2.9% less and were offered 2.2% less than men. When supplied with the median offer salary, however, the ask gap fell to zero—showing that women requested the same as men. “At least in the context of software engineers, it looks like when women are told what men are requesting, they are going to match it,” she says. “What was missing was information.”
Knowledge is power
Roussille has always been sensitive to questions of inequality; she grew up in the French city of Marseille, which lags behind other parts of the country economically. “I saw a lot of brilliant and motivated people around me held back by their circumstances,” she says. “I was animated early on by the sense that this wasn’t fair.” She originally studied for a master’s in finance, but found the topic uninspiring. After transferring to the Paris School of Economics and studying economic inequality with social economist Thomas Piketty, she went on to earn a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. “I realized economics is not just supply and demand curves,” she says, “but has something important to tell us about the world and its socioeconomic problems.”
Joining MIT’s renowned economics faculty in 2023 after a postdoctoral appointment at the London School of Economics, Roussille says she was “at first, a little intimidated! But what prevails,” she adds, “is a mix of admiration and gratitude for their supportive and dedicated mentoring.”
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In another recent study, she looked at the role of information in perpetuating inequality more broadly. Studying a group of German workers, she found that they routinely discounted what they could make by switching jobs, expecting only a 1% raise on average when they could potentially attain a 10% increase. She concluded that workers anchor their beliefs about the wage they could make at other employers on their current wage, rather than gaining a broad understanding of the wages in their field. This keeps workers in low paying firms from searching for other jobs, giving firms the power to keep wages artificially low.
Just as with the gender study, she found that when workers were given information about the median salaries in their field, it corrected their perceptions about wages in the market and their job search intentions, making them more likely to seek a new position or negotiate their current salary. “Giving workers more information about their market worth really changes their behavior,” says Roussille. She is encouraged by new transparency laws in more than a dozen US states that require employers to include a range of salaries in job postings, giving workers information with which to negotiate. “It’s a bit early to make definitive statements but, from early evidence we have, it seems to work,” she says.
Global research
Roussille has recently been examining gender inequality in South Asia. Countries such as Pakistan and India have seen low levels of female participation in the workforce (around 25%), even as the percentage of college-educated women has steadily increased. “When we survey them around graduation, most women intend to work, but when we track them later, very few of them have a job,” Roussille says. “It’s a huge loss for those countries.” Right now, however, the reason is unclear. Does it have to do with incorrect beliefs that women hold about the labor market or are firms discriminating against them? Roussille is collecting her own data and applying tools across several economic fields in search of answers.
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