Research: Posting a Wide Salary Range Can Deter Women from Applying

Pay transparency laws are spreading fast. As of 2025, 15 U.S. states and Washington, D.C., require employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings, and roughly 60% of postings on Indeed, up from 18% in 2020, now include salary information. The intent is straightforward: Give workers better information, level the playing field, and help close the persistent pay gaps across gender and race. Yet in most jurisdictions, the laws focus on whether a range is disclosed—not on how wide or narrow it should be—leaving employers substantial discretion. The result is wide variation in what job seekers actually see—even for identical roles. When California’s pay transparency law took effect in 2023, Tesla posted a senior software engineer position with a salary range of $83,000 to $418,000. Uber listed the same title at $174,000 to $194,000. Same state, same law, same job—but a $335,000 spread versus a $20,000 one. Netflix went further still, advertising a software engineer role at $90,000 to $900,000. The pattern extends beyond tech: When New York City’s law launched weeks earlier, Citigroup listed a client service officer position with a pay range of $0 to $2 million before correcting it to roughly $60,000 to $150,000. Our analysis of nearly 10 million U.S. job postings confirms this variation at scale: The average posted range spread was about $38,000, with a standard deviation exceeding $66,000—meaning that for comparable positions, one employer’s range might span $20,000 while another’s spans well over $100,000. There are understandable reasons companies post wide ranges. A single job title may encompass multiple seniority levels. Remote positions can require adjustments for geographic cost-of-living differences. In industries like tech and finance, variable compensation—bonuses, equity, commissions—creates genuinely large spreads in total pay. And regulators have offered limited guidance: When New York City’s law took effect, the city’s Commission on Human Rights did not specify how wide a range could be and still qualify as a “good faith” estimate. Compensation consultants at Gartner noted that a common approach is to set a range 20% above and below a target budget—but many postings go far beyond that. The question for senior leaders is whether this variation, however practical, may have consequences they haven’t considered—particularly for who decides to apply. How Pay Range Width Shapes Who Applies In research forthcoming in the Journal of Applied Psychology, we examined how the width of disclosed salary ranges affects job application decisions and subsequent negotiation behaviors, with a focus on gender differences. Across four studies—including an analysis of job postings paired with workforce data, survey experiments, and a field experiment with real applicants—we found a consistent pattern: Women show a stronger preference for jobs with narrower pay ranges compared to men. This showed up not only in our experiments but in the labor market itself. In our archival analysis of U.S. job postings and employment records, wider posted salary ranges were associated with lower representation of women in the workforce, even after accounting for firm size and other factors. What appears to drive this pattern? Our data points to differences in risk aversion. Consider two postings for the same role with the same midpoint salary: One lists a range of $55,000 to $75,000, the other $40,000 to $90,000. Both center on $65,000—but the wide range leaves you with considerably more uncertainty about where you’ll actually land. Women, on average, tend to be more averse to this kind of financial uncertainty, a finding documented in decades of research across economics and psychology. In our studies, gender differences in risk preference statistically accounted for women’s stronger pull toward narrower ranges. That said, risk aversion is likely one of several factors at play. Other mechanisms—such as perceptions of employer fairness, beliefs about how structured the compensation process is, or expectations about negotiation latitude—may also contribute to how men and women respond differently to pay-range width. Our findings suggest risk preference is an important part of the story, but probably not the whole story. The concern isn’t that women are making an irrational choice. Preferring a narrow range is a reasonable response to uncertainty. The concern is what it leads to. Across our studies, applicants who chose positions with narrower salary ranges consistently negotiated less assertively. They were more satisfied with a midpoint salary offer, less likely to say they would negotiate, and when they did counter, they asked for less money. In one of our experiments, participants who applied to the narrow-range job requested roughly $3,600 less in their counteroffer than those who applied to the wide-range job. That gap may seem modest for a single negotiation, but starting salaries have compounding consequences: raises, bonuses, and future offers are often pegged to current compensation. The logic is straightforward. Salary ranges act as anchors. When the posted range is $60,000 to $80,000 and you receive an offer of $70,000, it feels close to the ceiling. When the range is $40,000 to $100,000 and you receive that same $70,000 offer, you can see room above you. That visibility shapes expectations, satisfaction, and willingness to push for more. We also found that women made lower counteroffers than men overall—a gap that appears driven largely by women’s disproportionate selection into narrow-range positions rather than by inherent differences in how they negotiate within a given range. Taken together, these findings suggest a cycle worth paying attention to. The uncertainty of wide pay ranges tends to push women toward narrower alternatives more than it does men. The narrower ranges that women gravitate toward tend to suppress negotiation assertiveness. And less assertive negotiation is associated with lower starting salaries—which, given how compensation compounds, can ripple through a career. In other words, how a company structures its salary disclosure can influence who applies and how they negotiate—before a single interview takes place. For organizations working to build diverse talent pipelines, that means pay range design is a recruiting lever, not just a compensation detail. A Better Way to Design Transparency The good news is that there are ways to address this, and we tested one in our final study. We gave some participants additional context alongside the salary range: “For new hires who meet our core criteria, the typical starting salary is around $65,000. Your exact offer will reflect your relevant experience, skill level, and the responsibilities of the role.” Two sentences clarifying where most new hires land and what determines final pay. The effect was meaningful. In the control condition, women were about 10 percentage points more likely than men to choose the narrow range. With the additional context, that gap effectively disappeared—the intervention shifted women’s preferences toward the wider range while men’s remained unchanged. The gender difference in counteroffers was also eliminated. Choosing a narrow range still led to less assertive negotiation, but because the intervention reduced the gendered sorting that channeled women disproportionately into those positions, the downstream consequences diminished. This isn’t the only possible intervention, but it illustrates a broader principle: reducing ambiguity around compensation can help level the playing field. What should companies take from this? We see three priorities. First, don’t just post a range—explain it. If your range is wide, tell candidates where typical starting offers fall and what factors determine final pay decisions. This signals that compensation is structured rather than discretionary, and it can reduce the uncertainty that disproportionately deters women. Many companies already have this information internally; the intervention we tested required no new data, just a willingness to share it. Second, audit your ranges for unintended signals. If your salary band for a senior role spans $95,000 to $250,000, consider whether that range is truly necessary for a single posting—or whether it’s a catch-all masking distinct roles or seniority levels. The New York Department of Labor’s guidance is instructive: Ranges should reflect “a single opportunity and single geographic region.” Some jurisdictions are going further—New Jersey’s 2025 law caps the width of posted ranges at 60% of the minimum salary, pushing employers to define compensation bands with more precision. Third, recognize that compliance alone isn’t equity. Technically meeting the requirements of a transparency law—posting some range on a job ad—is not the same as advancing the law’s underlying goal. Companies that care about attracting diverse, high-caliber talent should view pay range disclosure not as a legal checkbox but as a strategic communication about what kind of employer they are. When a Wide Range Gives You Pause Our research also has implications for women applying for jobs—especially senior roles, where ranges tend to be wider. If a broad salary range gives you pause, consider asking the recruiter directly: “What is the typical starting salary for this role, and how are final offers determined?” It is also worth being aware that gravitating toward narrower ranges—while understandable—may mean accepting a lower ceiling before negotiations even begin. The discomfort with compensation uncertainty is real and widely shared, but recognizing it can help you make more deliberate choices about which opportunities to pursue. . . . Pay transparency laws represent meaningful progress. Workers deserve to know what a job pays before they invest time applying for it. But transparency without clarity can produce outcomes at odds with the equity these laws aim to promote. As more states adopt disclosure requirements and more companies voluntarily follow suit, employers face a choice: Comply in letter only, or use this moment to make hiring practices genuinely more informative and fair. The difference may shape who walks through your door—and who doesn’t.

Research: Posting a Wide Salary Range Can Deter Women from Applying

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