Is there a gender gap in our responses to a gender pay gap? An experiment

A significant amount of academic work has gone into trying to identify and quantify the importance of the key sources of the significant and persistent gender pay gap that exists. However, far less attention has been devoted to testing whether the desire or willingness to pursue policies to reduce this gap differs across gender. Using a laboratory experiment, I find, perhaps unsurprisingly, that males are far less likely than females to support such a policy when males are the higher-earning gender. However, the results flip dramatically when the earning positions are reversed along gender lines.