Women’s wages stagnate after 35, Glassdoor report finds

After slowly closing for decades, the gender pay gap started to expand again in 2024. A new report from Glassdoor highlights where the gap widened the most, and what role employers can play in creating fair workplaces for women.

Women’s wages often level off after 35, largely due to structural issues they disproportionately face, including caregiver responsibilities, according to the report. As such, the pay gap grows the longer women are in the workforce, from roughly 12% at the start of their careers, to 19% a decade in, the report found. The gap is much smaller (4%) for men and women in similar roles.

However, women frequently “plateau” in their careers by their mid-30s, suggesting that fewer promotion and advancement opportunities are available or taken. Overall, this contributes to the 25% pay gap many experience after three decades in the workforce. Men tend to assume more responsibilities and higher positions, leading to even bigger pay disparities.

“For whatever reason, men are getting paid more for the same role as women. And so this is not legal,” Chris Martin, lead researcher at Glassdoor told HR Brew, noting that employers are responsible for complying with Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. “We’ve made slower progress than, I think, a lot of advocates would like to see, but there’s evidence, especially if you take a longer view, that both the pay gap and this management and leadership gap have shrunk over the past 30 years, which is good.”

Many employers and several state governments have tried to close the gender pay gap through measures like pay transparency directives and public reports. However, some experts argue that pay transparency directives don’t lead to enough meaningful change, HR Brew previously reported.

“In the current environment, there’s less of it [pay reports] than there was in 2020 or 2021, when organizations were doing a lot proactively to showcase how they support people from varying identity groups that maybe historically had a harder time in the workplace,” Martin said. “I don’t anticipate seeing a lot of employers doing that in 2026. It is not the environment that we’re in.”

Instead, employers should examine their own compensation programs and conduct internal equality analyses to ensure they are fairly recruiting, motivating, and retaining talent, according to Martin.

Employers can also look at the gender diversity of their leadership development programs to better understand why women in their organizations don’t advance into leadership positions, Martin said. “What is it about those roles, or about that time that we can maybe address through different benefits or maybe more flexibility, or just thinking about the role,” he said. And yet, even the best efforts to fix gender disparities in the workplace still fail sometimes.

“It isn’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it,” Martin said. “Even the best intention policy that you implement could end up having the opposite impact, where it creates new work for the exact communities that you’re hoping to advance without advancing them.”