Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

A majority of U.S. municipalities hire a professional manager to oversee municipal operations, however, women make up only a small portion of the city managers in the United States. Prior research has examined the gender wage gap in other public sector organizations, including federal and state agencies, but few studies have examined this phenomenon among city managers. These studies fail to account for the impact of municipal level factors such as local resources or for individual level factors such as the manager’s prior experience and education. Using original data from a survey of municipalities, manager employment contracts, and additional municipal level data, we examine the gender wage gap among city managers. We find that female city managers do make significantly less in salary than their male counterparts. The extensive dataset allows us to parse out how factors related to individual productivity (particularly education and years of experience) and the nature of each specific job (specifically municipal economic/financial condition) impact manager compensation separate from gender. We conduct a wage decomposition analysis, taking into account measured personal and municipal characteristics. As such, we can both isolate and measure the impact of gender on compensation. We examine whether certain characteristics are valued more among men than women, such as holding a graduate degree, and to determine whether there remains an unexplained portion of the gender wage gap, suggesting that municipal councils may compensate men more generously than women, all else equal.