Women in commercial real estate gather in Los Angeles to dissect a benchmark study that reveals progress on compensation alongside a troubling rise in workplace bias.
The compensation gap between men and women in commercial real estate has collapsed to just 4 percent on base salary, the narrowest margin in two decades of tracking. Yet for the first time since the study began in 2005, women in the industry now identify gender discrimination as the single biggest barrier to their advancement. That contradiction framed a candid, at times raw, roundtable hosted by CREW Los Angeles on May 13 at an Industry Insights event built around the 2025 CREW Network Benchmark Study.
Conducted every five years in partnership with the MIT Center for Real Estate, the study drew responses from 2,450 industry professionals between January and April 2025 and represents the fifth iteration of a longitudinal data set that now spans 20 years. Lexi Moriarty, founder and managing director of Axia Real Estate Advisors, LLC, has been involved with the benchmark study since its inception and walked the room through the long arc of the findings.
“The mission network is the only group that actually studies women in our industry, studies pay how women work in the industry, how many of them there are, where they are in the industry,” Moriarty said. “The study has been done every five years since 2005 and it’s the same questions, and therefore you have real data that you can really tabulate and track over time.”
The headline number got the loudest reaction. “The compensation gap in 2015 was about 23 percent,” Moriarty told the room. “In 2020 the gap went down to 10 percent and in 2025 you guys, the gap is 4 percent so I’m really excited about that.” Industry-wide base salary now averages $151,418 for men and $146,103 for women, according to CREW Network. The total compensation gap, which includes commissions, bonuses and profit-sharing, has likewise narrowed sharply, from 34 percent in 2020 to 13 percent in 2025, a movement driven almost entirely by an approximately 80 percent decline in men’s average commission and bonus revenues across asset classes.
Representation, however, has barely moved. Women still make up roughly 38 percent of the commercial real estate workforce, a figure that has remained virtually flat since 2005. At the top of the org chart, the picture is more stark: women hold approximately 9 percent of C-suite roles, unchanged across the last four studies. “We’re about equal in terms of management, so that’s good. 52 percent to 55 percent,” Moriarty noted, but added that “women are more likely to seek linear progressions in moving up the ladder, and men will often jump.”
Moriarty’s bottom line: “Progress is real, it’s not yet structural, but we’re making progress.” She cautioned that “we don’t need awareness by itself, we need companies to be accountable and have measurable goals to support women in real estate.”
Tori Robinson, vice president at First American Title Insurance Company’s National Commercial Title Services group, illustrated how the data itself has become a negotiating tool. After the first benchmark study landed, Robinson recounted, a former employer recruited her back to run its commercial division. Armed with the new data, she named a number she did not expect to be accepted. “I gave some giant number, and literally they go, okay, great,” she said. “I had tickets shops, I went back another seven years… It was because of that benchmark study that I had the chutzpah to say this is how much money I need to do this job.”
Moriarty said the study has produced similar leverage across the industry. “I really started seeing this with the 2020 study where crew members would take this study into their HR department, and they would say, ‘Look at this. Can you tell me where I am compared to male counterparts in my department?'” she said. “I can’t tell you how many people got raises because of that. HR departments in our industry are aware of this now, and they are afraid of being sued, and so they are making those changes.”
California’s pay transparency law, which took effect in the early 2020s and requires employers to post wage ranges, was credited by one roundtable participant for an immediate $30,000 annual pay increase that closed the gap with male counterparts in the same role. The 2025 study found that women still earn 35 percent less than men in compensation tied to commissions, bonuses and profit-sharing, underscoring how variable pay continues to drive the remaining disparity.
The discrimination findings cut sharply against the compensation gains. CREW Network reports that nearly 6 percent of women experienced sexual harassment at work in the past year, compared with less than 1 percent of men. The 2020 study marked a turning point on visibility of the issue, Moriarty said, when 45 percent of women said they had experienced offensive behavior in the workplace. Discussion of post-pandemic dynamics produced one of the most concrete takeaways of the evening, with multiple attendees describing how the move to remote and hybrid work has cut off informal mentorship channels, particularly in brokerage. Robinson, who founded her own brokerage in part to create a different culture, said brokerage compensation has eliminated some pay-gap dynamics because “we make our own money, we feast on what we catch.”
The roundtable closed on the study’s forward-looking finding that men and women now report similar long-term ambitions for C-suite roles, a convergence driven largely by a drop in men’s stated aspirations from 43 percent in 2020 to 30 percent in 2025. Whether the 9 percent ceiling on female C-suite representation finally cracks by the next benchmark in 2030 will be the test of whether the structural change Moriarty called for has actually arrived.
