According to Fusion, a new study suggests that if bosses want to increase productivity
among their workers, they should start by paying everyone equally. Economists from Columbia
and Berkeley conducted 14 experiments at set of factories in India to study the effects of pay
disparities on worker productivity.
They found that the amount workers get paid relative to co-workers has a huge impact on
how productive a worker is at work. Essentially, once workers found out they made less
than a co-worker for doing the same work, the productivity of the lower-paid worker
decreased substantially. This has implications for workplaces that engage in gender-based
pay inequity, the most common form being women paid less than men for doing the same work.