How does a fiscal crisis change the gender pay gap in a bureaucracy? To answer this question, we exploit the sudden budget crisis in Massachusetts (MA) in 2015 and examine how methods that governments employ to downsize their agencies---increasing senior officials' discretion in setting compensation and adopting individualized negotiations---have unequal impacts on government employees. We use Trial Court employees as a control group and employ a difference-in-differences design to estimate the effect of the fiscal crisis on the gender pay gap in the bureaucracy. Using 1.4 million observations of detailed individual-level data about public employees in the MA state government for the period 2010-2020, we find that the fiscal crisis increased the gender pay gap in executive agencies by 7.3 percentage points. Consequently, women earned significantly less than their comparable male counterparts after the fiscal crisis. We also find that there is significant variation in the gender pay gap: women in more senior positions and women who work in agencies with smaller shares of female employees (public safety and transportation) experienced the largest gender pay gap.