Female Stockbrokers Make Less Than Male Counterparts, Study Finds

Nearly 50 years after the United States passed the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the move toward achieving gender parity in the workplace is still incomplete.

As Rachel Maddow noted on her show earlier this month,"If you aggregate everybody working in the economy in every job, women get paid 77 cents for every dollar that men get paid."

Now, a new study has examined in detail the gender pay gap on Wall Street.

In the paper, "Performance-Support Bias and the Gender Pay Gap Among Stockbrokers," which will appear in the June issue of Gender & Society, Prof. Janice Fanning Madden of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Business School explains how female stockbrokers make less than their male counterparts.

"Stockbrokers are among the highest paid workers, yet they have the greatest gender inequality among all sales worker jobs," Madden writes.

The research is based on data collected from two of the largest commercial brokerage houses in the U.S., after women at both firms sued over wage disparity over sexual discrimination, LiveScience reports.

Madden examined how women could still be making less than men if the market, not a subjective performance review by a manager, decided how much they were paid, according to a press release announcing the results of the study.

While the firms cited a disparity of sales experience, Madden argues that this wasn't the case.

Instead, according to Madden, unequal treatment was to blame, as the women were "given less support than men and assigned inferior accounts."