雅思阅读 81: The Persistent Gender Pay Gap（持久的性别薪酬差距）

改编自 Fortune / Glassdoor Economic Research（2026年3月）。雅思阅读 Section 3 难度，约 1050 词。 素材来源：https://fortune.com/2026/03/05/gender-pay-gap-why-womens-earnings-plateau-in-30s-men-keep-rising-not-just-motherhood/

Reading Passage

A. A new analysis of millions of salary records lays bare a pattern that is well documented but still under-appreciated: women's pay stops growing roughly a decade before men's. While male earnings climb steadily through their thirties and forties, women's wages essentially flatten in their late thirties and remain stuck there. Year after year, that divergence compounds until, by the time workers have accumulated thirty years of experience, the gap between them reaches about twenty-five per cent. The figure is not a footnote; it reshapes lifetimes of earnings, retirement savings and economic security. What makes the finding so striking is not that a gap exists at all — that is scarcely news — but how it widens. At the starting line, the difference is modest and can be explained by the kinds of jobs and industries people enter. The deeper divergence comes later in a career, as one group keeps rising while the other stalls. Understanding why that happens is the key to deciding what, if anything, should be done about it. The gap is not a recent invention; researchers have measured pay differences between men and women for decades, and it has narrowed slowly as women's education and labour-force participation have risen. What is new is the precision of modern data. With millions of individual salary records rather than a few national averages, economists can now watch the divergence unfold year by year, career stage by career stage, and see exactly where men and women first part company.

B. The numbers tell a clear story. At the moment people begin their careers, men earn about twelve per cent more than women, but researchers attribute that entire difference to structural factors — the industries they enter, the roles they are hired into and the qualifications they bring. There is no detectable gap between men and women doing the same entry-level job. A decade in, the picture darkens. By ten years of experience, the gap has grown to nineteen per cent, and for the first time a within-role penalty appears: women in comparable positions now earn about four per cent less than their male colleagues. By the thirty-year mark, the total gap reaches twenty-five per cent. Yet only five percentage points of that figure are due to men and women in the same role being paid differently. The remaining twenty points reflect something harder to legislate away: men are advancing into higher-paid positions at a rate that women are not.

C. Researchers have long tied the plateau to motherhood. Many women reduce their hours, step back from demanding roles or leave the workforce entirely when children arrive, and each interruption carries a lasting penalty. One large study found women's earnings fall by about half after giving birth, regardless of their education or the size of their employer. The size of that drop underscores how sharply a single life event can reshape a lifetime earnings trajectory, and how difficult it is to recover ground once seniority and continuous experience have been interrupted. But the new analysis adds a troubling twist: even women who never had children and never left the workforce still earn substantially less than men by their fifties. Motherhood, in other words, cannot be the whole explanation. A newer, still-controversial finding points to a "menopause penalty" — a reduction in earnings in the years after menopause, unrelated to leaving work at all. If biology itself, at a life stage with nothing to do with childcare, seems to affect pay, then the problem reaches deeper than family choices.

D. Part of the mechanism lies in promotion. A survey found women almost ten percentage points less likely than men to feel comfortable aiming for a role above their current level. Fewer attempts mean fewer promotions, and because the within-role gap stays fairly small after the first decade, nearly all of the widening difference comes down to who climbs the ladder. Only about a third of women report feeling comfortable asking for a raise, compared with a larger share of men. Some observers frame this as a confidence gap and urge women to negotiate more aggressively. Others, including organisational psychologists, reject that framing. They argue women may have accurately observed that promotion systems are stacked against them, making their reluctance a rational response rather than a personal failing. The burden, they insist, should fall on employers to fix the systems, not on women to overcome them.

E. Pulling the evidence together, the pay gap turns out not to be a single problem but at least three. It is partly a sorting problem: women concentrate in lower-paying industries and roles. It is partly a promotion problem: fewer women are advancing into the senior posts that command the highest salaries. And it is partly a caregiving problem: unequal domestic burdens and scarce childcare push many women into flexible, lower-paid work. Each diagnosis implies a different remedy. If it is sorting, society must revalue the work that women disproportionately do. If it is promotion, firms should audit how they choose who advances. If it is caregiving, governments should fund paid leave and affordable childcare. The data, researchers note, point in all three directions at once — which means there is no single negotiation trick or one law that will close the gap. Closing it requires changing markets, promotions and family life together. Critics sometimes object that the headline figure compares people in genuinely different jobs, and they are right that "apples with apples" comparisons show a smaller gap. But that is precisely the point the newer research makes: the small within-job gap is real yet modest, while the much larger gap comes from who ends up in which jobs in the first place. A society that leaves women out of the highest-paid roles has not solved its pay problem merely by ensuring equal pay once they arrive.

Questions 1-4

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D and E from the list of headings below.

List of Headings i. How the gap grows over a full career ii. Beyond motherhood — other explanations iii. The promotion mechanism and its dispute iv. Three distinct problems, three remedies v. Women's wages plateau while men's keep rising vi. Why men refuse to ask for raises vii. The history of women's higher education

1. Paragraph B: ____
2. Paragraph C: ____
3. Paragraph D: ____
4. Paragraph E: ____

Questions 5-8

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

5. At career entry, how is the 12% gender gap explained? A. By direct discrimination within the same job. B. By structural factors such as industries, roles and qualifications. C. By women working shorter hours. D. By women holding fewer qualifications.

6. By the 30-year mark, what accounts for most of the 25% gap? A. Men advancing into higher-paying roles, rather than pay differences in the same job. B. Women being paid less for doing identical work. C. Women systematically working fewer hours. D. Women holding lower educational qualifications.

7. What complicates the motherhood explanation for the pay gap? A. Even childless women still earn less than men by their fifties. B. Mothers consistently earn more than childless women. C. Motherhood has no measurable effect on earnings. D. Men take longer parental leave than women.

8. Why do some psychologists reject the "confidence gap" explanation? A. Women's reluctance may be a rational response to biased systems. B. Women negotiate more aggressively than men. C. They believe no pay gap exists at all. D. They assume every employer is completely fair.

Questions 9-13

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer?

Write:

• TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
• FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
• NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

9. Women's earnings tend to plateau in their late thirties.
10. At career entry, there is already a large within-role pay gap.
11. A large study found women's earnings fall by about half after childbirth.
12. The Glassdoor report was funded by a group of major employers.
13. Women currently earn more than men at every stage of a career.

Questions 14-15

Complete the summary below using NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

By the 30-year mark, only a small part of the 25% gap is a within-role pay difference; most of it reflects men moving into higher-paying (14) __________. The report concludes the gap is not one problem but a sorting, promotion and (15) __________ problem.

答案与解析

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