Women in finance may be losing millions of dollars in potential career earnings, not just because of pay gaps, but due to structural forces that compound over decades, according to new research.

A report released March 6 by Lossdog, an AI-powered career compensation and portfolio intelligence platform launching in April 2026, estimates that professionals in developed economies may lose between $7 million and $15 million in economic value across their careers due to structural forces embedded in modern labor markets.

The study, “The Seven-Figure Pay Gap Isn’t Gender-Neutral: Why the Gap Compounds for Women,” argues that those forces affect nearly all professionals, but they compound more aggressively for women.

According to Tom Sosnoff, Co-Founder & Co-CEO, Lossdog, in finance, the gap between value creation and compensation is “particularly stark”. Revenue per employee at major financial institutions routinely exceeds $500,000, while median professional pay typically falls between $150,000 and $200,000, he said.

Women working in the industry face that structural imbalance while also encountering an additional layer of suppression. “Forty to sixty percent of the gender pay gap remains unexplained even after controlling for role and qualifications,” Sosnoff said. “That’s pure structural discount,” he told Traders Magazine.

Lossdog’s analysis suggests that a female financial manager may earn roughly $4.74 million in lifetime compensation in today’s dollars, even while generating two to four times that amount in value for her firm.

More broadly, the firm estimates that a professional earning $100,000 annually could leave $3.9 million in uncaptured value on the table over a 30-year career due to structural labor market forces such as employer concentration, declining labor share and the long-term decoupling of productivity from pay. For women, the report suggests, that $3.9 million figure is closer to a starting point than a final tally.

The compounding effect is what ultimately widens the gap. Sosnoff said the dynamics that shape pay trajectories often include a “reset mechanism” that disproportionately affects women. “The compounding mechanism has a reset button—and it gets pressed harder for women,” he said.

Career interruptions, most commonly associated with maternity leave, can permanently alter earnings trajectories because future raises are calculated from a lower base salary. “A career interruption at year 10 doesn’t cost two years of income,” Sosnoff said. “It resets the base from which every subsequent raise compounds.” At an annual salary growth rate of about 4%, that change can reverberate for decades. “The motherhood penalty isn’t a deduction. It’s a reset of the exponent,” he added.

Even in areas of finance often viewed as meritocratic, such as trading and asset management, the research argues that outcomes are shaped long before performance metrics are recorded. Access to the opportunities that generate measurable results is not always evenly distributed. “Access to high-value accounts, deal flow and client relationships—the inputs that drive measurable performance—are distributed through networks that systematically underrepresent women,” Sosnoff said. “You can’t outperform on opportunities you aren’t given.”

He also pointed to broader labor market dynamics that weaken employees’ bargaining power. “The monopsony data is unambiguous,” Sosnoff said. “About 60% of professional labor markets exceed Department of Justice concentration thresholds. The game is structurally tilted before the first trade is placed.”

Those pressures can intensify as careers progress, according to Jeff Joseph, CSO, Lossdog, who said promotion bottlenecks and limited mobility within finance can quietly amplify compensation disparities over time. “Promotion bottlenecks are monopsony in slow motion,” he said.

Joseph described what the firm calls the “firm-specific capital trap,” where professionals become more valuable to their current employer but less able to move elsewhere. “The firm-specific capital trap—where you become more valuable and more trapped simultaneously—closes earlier and deeper for women in finance,” Joseph said.

Geographic concentration of financial institutions already limits the number of alternative employers in many markets. When non-compete agreements, family career dynamics and the discounting of female-typed specializations are added to the mix, the leverage that normally drives competitive compensation can fade, Joseph said. “The outside option that would force competitive compensation essentially disappears,” he said.

Lossdog’s platform is designed to address what the firm sees as a central driver of these disparities: information asymmetry. Employers typically have access to vast compensation datasets across thousands of hires, while individual professionals often negotiate based on their own salary history and informal benchmarks.

“The research is unambiguous: information asymmetry is a primary mechanism of suppression,” Joseph said. He argues that women in finance in particular should view compensation negotiations as long-term compounding decisions rather than short-term salary adjustments. “A $10,000 difference at year five isn’t $10,000. At 4% annual raises over 25 years, it’s nearly $27,000 annually by career end,” he stressed.