Axios Austin
May 06, 2026
1 big thing: ACL Fest unveils lineup
2. 🎓 Women MBAs are still outearned by men
The pay gap between high-earning millennial and Gen Z men and women is shrinking compared with earlier generations.
Why it matters: Women are doing it by working longer hours and staying in the workforce, rather than taking timeouts for child care, per a new working paper by scholars at the University of California, Berkeley.
By the numbers: Thirteen years out of school, women who earned their MBA before 2006, on average, earned more than $100,000 less a year than their male counterparts. (If you take stock options and other equity grants into account, the gap gets even wider.)
- For younger folks, at the 13-year point, the difference is just $34,000.
Zoom in: The class of 2025 at the University of Texas' McCombs School of Business was 35% female and 65% male, a UT official tells Axios. Their average overall salary is $154,000 — UT doesn't disclose the information by gender.
- The class of 2005 was 23% female and 77% male.
The big picture: The paper is an update on landmark research that found the pay disparity starts revving up over time, as more women see their careers interrupted by motherhood or reduce their hours to deal with child care.
What they're saying: "The only reason women are being paid less ... is because they are women," says Noor Sethi, a Ph.D. candidate at Berkeley who co-authored the new paper.
3. 🤠 The Roundup: Wrangling the news
4. 🔊 Sound off on I-35 pain points
5. 🧢 1 baseball hat to go
🧑🦲 Asher here, your intrepid vintage goods correspondent.
The big picture: Being thin of hair, I'm always on the lookout for a good baseball hat to keep my pate protected.
State of play: I spotted this cap (☝️) this week at Howdy's, a vintage store in East Austin, off Manor Road.
- It's awesome in its wordiness (try saying "delayed coker safety, quality and productivity" three times fast); fantastic in its ugliness; effectively unique; personally relatable, since I once worked in an Alaskan oil refinery.
- Price tag: $20.
Yes, but: It fell into the category of clothing item you kinda want but can't or won't quite pull off — in this case, just a shade too hipster-industrial-Nascar.
The intrigue: Instead I opted to buy an old Bell telephone sweater ($34) that each of my little kids can grow into.
- "Reach Out and Touch Someone," it says beneath rainbow striping, part of an advertising campaign dating to the late 1970s.
The bottom line: As corporate paraphernalia goes, it's less aesthetically brazen and more cozy than that Exxon option.
Axios Austin
