Gender pay gap starts at 6, study finds, as boys ‘tend to overestimate their abilities compared to girls’

22 January 2025, 20:09

A study found that schoolboys as young as six ask for bigger bonuses than girls for the same work, showing a tendency to overestimate their abilities - behaviour that could shed light on the gender pay gap in adults.

The pay gap between men and women has been steadily decreasing since the late 1990s, but still represents the persisting inequality between men and women in the workplace.

The gender pay gap decreased to 13.1% in April 2024, down from 14.2% in April 2023, but women are still much less likely than men to occupy senior roles or management functions, according to the Office for National Statistics.

A new study might point to one reason why this gender pay gap is so persistent, focusing on differences that emerge between boys and girls in primary school.

The study looked at the differences in attitudes towards negotiation in children, performing a number of experiments with more than 400 children between the ages of six and nine.

One of the experiments had the children participate in a game in which they had to quickly recognise pictures on a screen. Regardless of how they performed, they would be rewarded with animal photos.

After the game, the kids were told to negotiate how many pictures of animals they deserved. The researchers found that the boys asked for higher bonuses - more pictures - than the girls, even if they had performed roughly the same in the game.

And it was no small difference - boys would ask for more pictures than 65% of girls on average, pointing to a higher opinion of their own abilities.

“Our findings suggest that boys tend to overestimate their abilities compared to girls—and relative to their actual performance,” Sophie Arnold, a New York University doctoral student and the lead author of the paper, said.

“This inflated self-perception may lead boys to feel more entitled to push the boundaries during negotiations.”

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Ms Arnold and her colleagues looked at the children’s attitudes towards negotiation, suggesting that the disparities between the children could explain the gender pay gap in adult men and women in the workplace.

In another experiment, the students were asked to complete classroom work and negotiate a bonus with a teacher, or to do neighbourhood work and negotiate bonuses with their neighbours.

In these tests, boys and girls were found to have similar perceptions of negotiations.

They thought the other children were also likely to negotiate, that it was similarly allowed to do so, that there would be little backlash if they tried negotiating, and that it would lead to similar rewards.

The difference was that the boys, on average, were more comfortable with asking for a higher bonus, and thought that if they did, they were likely to succeed. As such, they would ask for higher rewards.

The girls - who also thought negotiating was permitted and would bring about little backlash - didn’t ask for bigger bonuses.

"Boys leveraged their perceptions of how common and permissible it is to ask for more, while girls did not," said Katherine McAuliffe, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Boston College and one of the co-authors of the study.

"This meant that, for example, when both girls and boys thought it was more common and more permissible to negotiate, boys negotiated more than girls did."