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Female employees consistently pay lower airfares than men do for the same flights because they tend tobook earlier.

We compared the airfare paid by employees in the same position within a company for the same class oftravel and used a common statistica technique to account for other factors that might affect differences inairfares. We found that women paid on average S18 less per ticket than their male colleagues. Furtherinvestigation allowed us to conclude that this gap is largely explained by the fact that women tended to bookearlier than men,1.8 days on average.

We wanted to determine what was causing these gender differences in booking business trips so wetested a variety of possible explanations,such as women choosing to plan ahead or male frequent travelersbeing inclined to book late.None of these explained away the gender gap, so we applied data collected fromsurveys that express consumer preferences that play a central role in economic decisions, such as patience andrisk avoidance.

We found that only the concept of “negative reciprocity”— in which an employee who feels unfairlytreated engages in negative behaviors,such as spending their company's money less carefully — explainsthese differences. The surveys showed men tend to exhibit more of these negative behaviors than women.This isn't to say that all men engage in these behaviors — or that booking relatively late is a sign of abnormalbehavior. It only means that the gender gap disappears when we plug in the negative reciprocity variable.

Prior research on negative reciprocity among workers found that it can result in lower employeemotivation, business performance and workplace morale and culture.

Our results show another way these negative behaviors can manifest themselves, like in airline bookings,and add to evidence that women are less likely to engage in them.

Companies spend significant sums of money on business trave1. While that S18 difference per ticket mayseem small, it adds up. Our analysis suggests early booking by women can translate into savings of $1 milliona year for a large multinational company with 20,000 regular travelers.