Fourth Year Hon. Mention: Can Soft Skills Reduce the Gender Pay Gap?

ECON 4089, Research Seminar in Economics. CD: Tsvetanka Karagyozova.

Abstract

If we want to solve the gender pay gap (in short, the issue that men make money than women for doing the same job), we should start with helping women to nurture and accentuate the soft skills that corporate culture so desperately needs. That’s what experts think is the key to fixing this problem, and the fact that so many women have experienced professional success in recent years would seem to prove that this is the right approach. But, as this paper explores, the truth isn’t simple. In fact, many soft skills—empathy, teamwork, time management, etc.—can have a surprisingly negative impact on how female employees are perceived and paid. When women lean into more active soft skills like leadership and personal assertiveness, they are negatively perceived from a different angle: selfish, pushy, and undeserving. It seems like just encouraging empathy isn’t enough. The whole system, and how we think about women and power, needs to change.

The author of this paper upends conventional wisdom about the gender pay gap with urgency, clarity, and a perceptive ability to find the real story at the heart of the data. This is the paper’s great strength: the author doesn’t accept scholarly evidence without interrogating it, referring to empirical research that supports their claims while also noting its potential gaps and how it might miss important points of nuance. The author refuses to take any truth at face value. This paper is a testament to how great writing and research can be the key to working through big issues and figuring out where to go next, and it’s a reminder that we can’t ever stop thinking about how to solve a problem just because the solution seems easy on the surface.