‘Meaningful Insight’

The research shows that giving consumers “meaningful insight into the consequences of their financial decisions makes a real difference in outcomes,” said Michael Barr, a University of Michigan law professor who helped to draft the Dodd-Frank legislation as a Treasury Department official.

Bertrand’s work has won recognition from her peers, including the 2004 Elaine Bennett Research Prize, presented for “outstanding contributions by young women in the economics profession,” and the 2012 Sherwin Rosen Award for outstanding contributions to labor economics, which cited her CEO pay and discrimination studies.

Her focus in recent years has centered on the role of women in the workplace and provides a counterpoint to the view expressed by Facebook Inc. Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, author of the bestselling book “Lean In.” Sandberg urges women to pursue their careers aggressively, for example by negotiating harder for pay increases.

More Complicated

While “the work that Sandberg did is very compelling,” Bertrand said she is “more skeptical you can undo -- just with asking for more -- all the things we see in the data. It is much more complicated than women should be more aggressive and everything would work itself out.”

One study she co-wrote with Katz and Claudia Goldin, also a Harvard economics professor, tracked the career paths of Chicago MBAs who graduated between 1990 and 2006. It found that women started with earnings averaging 88 percent of men in similar positions, with the gap quickly widening as the women took off work to become mothers, even for relatively short leaves. After a decade, their income amounted to just 55 percent of men’s.

“What explains this gap?” Bertrand said. “It is essentially children. Once children come in, these women slow down, they work fewer hours. It is hard to stay on the business- career track if you have taken time out.”

Change Culture

Her research suggests employers need to change workplace cultures and the government needs to strengthen its equal-pay laws, partly because “the notion of the pay gap getting larger as women’s careers progress is not unique to MBAs,” said Latifa Lyles, acting director for the women’s bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor.