Alice Lee
speaker
23 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2026
last heard 20 Mar
Alice Lee’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Happy to be here.
So women on average tend to be more averse to financial uncertainty.
And so if you see a wide range, you have very little idea of where you're actually going to land.
Past work suggests that women, like I said, tend to be more risk averse than men.
And due to that, we found that women on average were opting more into job postings that had narrower pay ranges, more so than men were.
The preference towards risk aversion in itself, I don't think is a problem.
I think that is a natural tendency.
And I think there's good reason to respond in this way to ambiguous signals.
The problem isn't the preference in itself, but sort of what happens after that.
What we found in our research is that those who apply to narrow ranges are then more satisfied with an average offer.
They're less likely to initiate negotiations.
And when they do, they make offers that are much less assertive, meaning lower, and are thus less likely to end up with a higher salary than those that might have applied to a wider salary range.
I think that's exactly right.
And this cycle that we were finding does suggest that this could lead to a perpetuation because if women or those that are more generally averse to risk are disproportionately applying to jobs with narrow pay ranges and afterwards then negotiating less assertively, you could imagine how this then leads to a certain demographic ending up with a lower salary at the end.
I want to start off by acknowledging that employers, I think, do need some flexibility in how they set ranges.
A single job title might span multiple experience levels.
I think remote roles need to account for geographic cost of living differences, and industries have variable compensation like bonuses and equity.
So the goal, I don't think, should be to eliminate discretion, but I think it's the fact that discretion comes at a cost of clarity sometimes.
New Jersey's law, I think, is a good model.
It's capped the width of posted ranges at 60% of the minimum salary.
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