This dissertation investigates key aspects of the gender wage gap in the U.S.The first chapter studies whether there is a gender \ask gap", that is whether women
with similar resume to men's ask for lower wages. This analysis relies on the innovative
recruitment process of an online recruitment platform for full-time engineering jobs in the
United States. To use the platform, job candidates must post their resume information as
well as an ask salary, stating how much they want to make in their next job. Using data
on more than 120,000 candidates over several years, I first document a 7.2% raw ask gap on
the platform. After controlling for all the candidates' resume characteristics, the ask gap is
3.3%. In other words, women with resumes comparable to those of men ask for 3.3% less.
The second chapter investigates the relationship between the gender ask gap and the
gender wage gap. In this chapter, I leverage the fact that, on the recruitment platform, firms apply to candidates by offering them a bid salary, solely based on the candidate's resume
and ask salary. Additionally, if the candidate is hired, a final salary is recorded. Using data
on more than 510,000 bids, I find a raw bid gap on the platform of 3.4%. Adjusting for
candidates' resume characteristics but excluding their ask salary leaves a 2.4% residual bid
gap. When candidates' ask salaries are included as a control, this residual bid gap disappears.
In other words, while resume characteristics can only reduce the bid gap by 30%, gender
differences in ask salaries can essentially explain 100% of the bid gap. For the sub-sample
of 8,333 hired candidates, gender differences in ask salaries explain nearly all of the gap in
final offers. In particular, while conditioning on resume characteristics only narrows the final
offer gap to 1.8%, adding the ask salary to the controls yields an insignificant final offer gap
of -0.5%. I find no evidence of discrimination against women at the extensive margin. In
fact, conditional on their resume characteristics, women get slightly more bids than men
and, conditional on interviewing, women are just as likely as men to get a final offer.
The third chapter estimates the market-level effects of an increase in women's ask salaries,
leveraging an unanticipated feature change on the platform. In mid-2018, Hired.com abruptly
changed the way that some candidates were prompted to provide their ask salary. From the
first year of the data to mid-2018, candidates stated their ask salary by filling out an empty
text box. Starting in mid-2018, the answer box for San Francisco software engineers was pre
filled with the median bid salary over the past 12 months for the candidate's combination of
desired location, job title, and experience. In effect, this change gave candidates information
on the typical offers received by similar candidates on the platform and provided them with
an anchor to benchmark their own ask salary. Using an interrupted time series design, I show
that the new framing of the ask salary elicitation eliminated the ask gap and rendered the
bid gap insignificant. These results are mostly driven by women asking for higher salaries
after the reform. Further, I find no discernable impact on the number of bids that women
received or the time it took women to receive their first bid, suggesting that women had
effectively been leaving money on the table.