Gender and perceived pay entitlement: testing for effects of experience with income

This article reports on 2 studies where variations on a research design from the literature on gender and perceived pay entitlement were used to test for effects of past pay experience and salience of the pay experience for the participants. In Study 1, level of previous income was not a predictor of self-payment behavior for women or men, and men allocated more pay to themselves than did women. In Study 2, women and men did not differ on perceived entitlement when the income and work experience were made salient, but they did in the nonsalient condition, as in Study 1. Also, past income and self-pay were positively correlated for women in the salient condition. Further, when the data from Study 1 and Study 2 from the same condition (past income nonsalient) were combined, those with the higher previous income level paid themselves more than others, among both men and women.