Dive Brief:
- After being laid off, 57% of U.S. workers said they’ve felt pressured to accept a lower salary to get back to work, according to Glassdoor poll results released Tuesday.
- Women, the results show, feel greater pressure, with 63% saying they’d considered a lower offer compared to 52% of men.
- In fact, Glassdoor found in another poll that nearly 40% of workers who’d been laid off said they still hadn’t fully recovered. Meanwhile, it takes almost three years for a company’s rating to bounce back after a layoff, Glassdoor’s economic research team reported.
Dive Insight:
The Glassdoor findings show a potential worsening of the gender pay gap through layoffs.
Women earned about $0.82 per dollar earned by men in 2025, a recent analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by resume builder MyPerfectResume found. Despite women’s median weekly earnings doubling in the past 25 years, the uncontrolled gap between what men and women earned grew more than 60% to $12,324 annually by 2025, the report showed.
Payscale found in a March report that the gender pay gap exists at every education level and “widens significantly” as women get older and advance in their careers.
That widening gap can partially be attributed to male employees’ likelihood to use external job opportunities to negotiate greater earnings, according to a study of Swedish workers published by the Rockwool Foundation Berlin Institute for the Economy and Future of Work. RFBerlin found that in jobs where bargaining is limited, the pay gap caused by job opportunities disappeared.
Yet 30% of employed women say they’ve faced discrimination when trying to earn equal wages because of their gender, compared to only 10% of employed men who said the same, according to the results of a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released in March.