I have no idea. But I'm willing to guess he faces lower odds of being asked for a date by senior personnel in the better-paid department he would like to work in, thereby de facto closing doors in my face.
I am not trying to argue sexism/bias does not exist but from my experience any gaps in employment are a flag used to filter out candidates so in this particular scenario that might be the main problem to overcome.
That's super disgusting if that happened to you :( Maybe at some point we need to stop interacting in person completely and instead use gender-less avatars with their own voices so that we can bypass both sexual harassment as well as trying to land better positions by our own physical attractiveness.