Definition: In this task, you are given a text of many news articles seperated by special token "|||||". Your task is to summarize them.
Input: Hired had a problem. Women on the online hiring platform were consistently underbidding themselves. Hired, which lets technology workers post their preferred salaries so companies can interview them and extend offers, saw female applicants ask for lower salaries 69% of the time compared to men with comparable experience and skills. 
  
 Fixing that, thought Jessica Kirkpatrick, Hired’s lead data scientist, was a matter of education: give women data about average salaries in their field and they would correct their mistake. She helped design a feature giving candidates a custom range of average salaries based on their skills and experience. 
  
 Hired showed job candidates salary distributions for comparable candidates based on location, years of experience, and job title during the signup process. (Hired) 
  
 It didn’t go well. 
  
 After testing with thousands of candidates, the gender gap worsened. Women in the experimental group, newly aware of their salary distributions, placed themselves on the lower half of the salary curve. Men, with comparable skills and experiences, tended to assign themselves to the upper half. That led to a gender gap in preferred salaries that was even bigger than the gap among those who didn’t see the data at all (women in the experimental group asked for 9.3% less money than men compared to the control group which asked for 4% more money than men). 
  
 In retrospect, Kirkpatrick says the results don’t surprise her. In her first job as a data scientist, the former physicist—who holds an astrophysics PhD from the University of California-Berkeley—asked for a base salary near the lower end of her field. She eventually discovered men on her team with similar experience and job titles were paid $10,000 more. The income loss compounded over years and different jobs until arriving at Hired (which boosted her pay by 25%). 
  
 “I know that as a woman I am…likely to be more hesitant to put myself forward for opportunities where I don’t meet ‘all’ the qualifications—yet knowing this information doesn’t make it easier to advocate for myself or put myself forward for challenging opportunities,” Kirkpatrick wrote by email. “I still struggle with this on a regular basis. As a data-oriented person, I do find it easier to advocate for myself when I am armed with objective facts or statistics that can help back-up my requests. I also regularly put myself forward for opportunities that terrify me and where I don’t feel qualified, because I figure if I had the confidence and socialization of a man, I maybe wouldn’t have the same hesitations and self-doubt.” 
  
 Yet the experiment’s failure belied a promising trend Hired uncovered in a gender-wage gap report it released on April 4. The report was based on 120,000 interview requests and job offers from 8,000 companies in 2016. 
  
 Women in tech early in their career are now asking for higher salaries, and getting them. Analyzing the 2016 data, Hired found a sharp divergence between relative new and senior technology professionals. Female candidates with less than five years of work experience ask for higher salaries than their male counterparts, and those with less than one year of experience were the most confident, asking for an average of 4% more relative to comparable men. They also received 8% more in salary offers, equivalent to $1.08 in salary for every $1 offered to men. On average, that equated to more than $3,300 per year. 
  
 Yet that relationship reverses after six years. At that point, female candidates ask for about $5,000 less relative to comparable male candidates. 
  
 The reason is hard to isolate. Kirkpatrick suspects the more senior female job candidates may have seen lower salaries early in their career compounded over time, while new entrants are pushing for parity. A second possibility is that the demand for female tech companies to diversify their workplace has put female developers in high demand, and most of these new jobs are going to more junior candidates. 
  
 Hired is now exploring ways to give candidates salary data without widening the gender gap such as replacing a salary range with a single-number recommendation. 
  
 Correction: A previous version of this article stated an incorrect number of interview requests and the share of women who asked for lower salaries than men. This has been corrected. ||||| Shutterstock 
  
 Jessica Kirkpatrick, a data scientist with a Ph.D. in astrophysics, was looking for a new job. She had spent the past few years working at tech firms in the Bay Area, and she began using Hired.com, a recruiting site. Hired asks candidates to state their preferred salaries, then matches them with potential employers. Kirkpatrick told Hired she wanted a 10% raise on her current compensation. She was surprised by what she learned next. 
  
 A representative from Hired told Kirkpatrick that, based on the current market for data scientists, she should ask for a 25% raise. In other words, she was significantly underpaid at her current job. In a prior role, Kirkpatrick had found out she was paid less than her male counterparts, but it hadn’t been by such a large margin. 
  
 Watch on Forbes: 
  
 She took Hired’s advice and upped her salary preference. Among the 18 companies that contacted Kirkpatrick through Hired, several offered a salary in the range of a 25% raise, and three or four made offers of a 50% bump. One of the firms that met Kirkpatrick's asking price (of a 25% raise) was Hired.com itself, and Kirkpatrick joined the startup as its lead data scientist. 
  
 Today Hired released a report showing that Kirkpatrick’s experience of seeing a widened wage gap several years into her career is common. According to Hired’s data, women aren't paid less than men early in their careers, a dynamic possibly driven by today’s heightened awareness of a gender pay gap. But when they reach six years’ experience, a gap appears. Recent data from workforce analytics firm Visier shows a similar pattern—the pay gap begins to widen for women at age 32 and continues to do so until age 40. 
  
 Hired calculated the pay gap between men and women in the same job, at the same company. And it showed an overall gap of 4% for technical positions. That’s much lower than the often-cited 20% pay gap, because the latter compares all men with all women in the country, regardless of industry or job title. That doesn’t mean the 20% number isn’t valid; it is. It’s just set in a broader context. 
  
 What causes the pay gap to grow alongside years of experience? “I believe biases and inequities accumulate over time,” Kirkpatrick says. For example, men are 30% more likely to be promoted from an entry-level role to manager, according to a study by McKinsey and Sheryl Sandberg’s LeanIn.org. Women are socialized to play down their achievements and self-promote less, Kirkpatrick adds. 
  
 Another factor relates to negotiation. Women are less aggressive in negotiating, research has shown, and when they try, they meet more resistance and have less success than men. Kirkpatrick experienced this dynamic first-hand. After getting her Ph.D., she joined a tech company around the same time as two male colleagues with the same job title and similar experience. All three of them were initially offered the same salary by the same hiring manager, Kirkpatrick wrote in a Quartz post, and all asked for more money. Kirkpatrick was the only one denied an increase. The two men walked away with salaries $10,000 higher. 
  
 Child care also matters. When women take parental leave, their salaries are affected more negatively than when men take leave. 
  
 And companies often base new hires’ compensation on their most recent salary. Since women are generally paid less than men, that difference gets exacerbated at every new job they take. 
  
 What can organizations and employees do to reduce the pay gap? First, companies should keep offers equitable, says Kirkpatrick. When a business sees a prospective hire who has a low current salary, it’s tempting to make him or her a low offer, since it may save tens of thousands of dollars in the short term. Conversely, for candidates with high current salaries who play hardball in negotiations, it’s tempting to go outside the company’s norms and offer more pay. “But in the long term, if you have large disparities, people figure that out,” Kirkpatrick says. “It’s not good for retaining talent and helping people feel like they’re at a place that values them.” 
  
 Firms should conduct regular salary audits to look for gender and race-based inequities. Today Glassdoor released a 17-page guide for how employers can analyze the gender pay gap among their employees. And companies should recognize the need for mentorship and sponsorship of people who are underrepresented in their organization. 
  
 For women preparing to negotiate, “come in armed with data knowing what your worth is,” Kirkpatrick says. Tools like PayScale, Glassdoor’s Know Your Worth and Comparably can help. Speaking with peers and joining professional groups is also useful—the more you can broaden the pool of people you discuss compensation with, the better. 
  
 Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Kirkpatrick initially wanted a 25% raise and that a representative from Hired suggested she ask for a 50% increase. 
  
 Follow me on Twitter @JeffKauflin or email me at jkauflin[at]forbes[dot]com. ||||| A year into my first tech job, I found out that two men on my team were being paid $10,000 more than me. I was shocked because we had the same job title, similar experience, and had been hired around the same time by the same hiring manager. While we all received the same initial salary offer and all attempted to negotiate, they were able to secure a higher base salary while I was not. My story is frustrating and disheartening, but it’s far from uncommon. 
  
 While one could argue that awareness and engagement around women’s issues are at an all-time high, many of the metrics that point to the progression of gender equality have barely budged in recent years. Today is Equal Pay Day, which symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year. 
  
 At Hired, we feel a responsibility to our clients, our employees, our candidates, and the hiring industry at large to serve as a catalyst for a more inclusive and equitable workforce. That’s why for the second year in a row, we’re releasing data and gathering leaders in the tech community to shed light on the gender wage gap — an issue that is improving so slowly that women aren’t expected to receive equal pay for equal work until 2152. 
  
 In fact, data released today from our 2017 “Women, Work and the State of Wage Inequality” report shows that 63% of the time, women receive lower salary offers than men for the same job at the same company. For one out of every ten job openings we analyzed, companies offered men salaries that were more than 20% higher than those offered to women. 
  
 The effects of gender bias influence access to opportunity as well: 53% of the time, companies only interviewed male candidates for a given role, whereas the reverse was true just 6% of the time. Long-term, these kinds of biases may explain why U.S. women working in STEM are 45 percent more likely than their male peers to leave the industry within their first year. 
  
 White men outearn everyone else 
  
 The way women with intersecting underrepresented identities are impacted by the wage gap has not been studied as thoroughly; that’s why this year we explored how race and LGBTQ status intersect with gender to affect salaries and salary expectations. 
  
 What we found is that on average, white men are offered the highest salaries and black women are offered the lowest salaries. In fact, the gap between white men and black women is 21%, which is twice as large as the gap between white men and white women. Overall, men of all races receive higher salary offers than women with one exception: white women make two percent more than black men. 
  
 LGBTQ candidates earn less 
  
 When we examined the effect of LGBTQ status, we found that non-LGBTQ men outearn all other categories, followed by LGBTQ men, non-LGBTQ women and finally, LGBTQ women. Salary expectations followed the same pattern. We also found that LGBTQ women are the only category of candidates who receive lower average salary offers than their preferred salaries. 
  
 By providing insights about wage inequity in the workplace, we aim to empower companies and candidates alike to close the gap. We hope to both inspire companies to use this data to inform their own compensation policies and arm candidates with the objective information they need to ask for a salary in line with their market value. 
  
 In addition to our in-depth analysis, we’ll be hosting our second annual Women, Work, & the State of Wage Inequality event this evening in San Francisco to discuss the gender wage gap and how we can close it. Tune in to our Facebook Live as we stream commentary from thought leaders from Hired, Affirm, Pandora and ReadySet & Project Include discuss topics related to the gender wage gap. |||||
Output:
For Jessica Kirkpatrick, an astrophysicist-turned-data-scientist, information helps bridge gaps. But when she tried to use it to narrow the gender wage gap in her new role as chief data scientist at Hired, she learned that more data isn't always helpful—and that's at least in part down to human behavior. As Quartz reports, after staging an experiment on the site that armed male and female applicants with a range of average salaries in their fields, the women put themselves on the lower half of the salary curve and the men with comparable skills and experiences put themselves on the upper half. Suddenly, women were asking for almost 10% less money than men; women in the control group who didn't see the salary range were actually asking for 4% more than their male counterparts. In hindsight, Kirkpatrick says the results aren't surprising. Women are historically less aggressive negotiators who play down their achievements, and what Hired calls the "expectation gap" for salary widens as the ratio of men to women in a role increases—and as a woman's length of time in the workforce increases. Hired found that women with less than five years of work experience are asking for higher salaries than men and receive 8% more in salary offers, but this trend reverses within six years. And, as Forbes notes, the inequities (including promotions) compound like interest over time. In a recent Hired blog post, the current trend suggests that at this rate, women won't receive equal pay for their work until the year 2152. (These teens were fired after noticing the wage gap between them.)