DETECTING SALARY DISCRIMINATION AGAINST MALE AND FEMALE MANAGERS

This paper reports two experiments that examine factors influencing th e detection of salary discrimination in organizations. Subjects were p resented with information about the qualifications and salaries of fem ale and male managers in 10 departments of an hypothetical company and were asked to judge the fairness of these salaries. It was hypothesiz ed that the amount of information and the format in which it is presen ted influence fairness judgments. Moreover it was hypothesized that ma les and females differ in their fairness judgments. The two experiment s corroborate these hypotheses. The results are interpreted in terms o f two possible information processing biases: encoding bias and attrib utional bias.