Gender, sexism and pay

Posted by Ricki Sharpe on October 25, 2008  
Filed Under Work Behaviour

When it comes to sex roles in society, what you think may affect what you earn. A new study has found that men who believe in traditional roles for women earn more money than men who don’t, and women with more egalitarian views don’t make much more than women with a more traditional outlook.

Timothy Judge, PhD, and Beth Livingston from the University of Florida, analysed data from a nationally representative study of men and women who were interviewed four times between 1979 and 2005. A total of 12,686 people, ages 14 to 22 at the beginning of the study, participated; there was a 60 percent retention rate over the course of the study.

At each of the four interviews, participants were asked about their views on gender roles in the work force and at home. They answered questions such as whether they believed a woman’s place is in the home, whether employing wives leads to more juvenile delinquency, if a man should be the achiever outside the home and if the woman should take care of the home and family.

Participants were also asked about their earnings, religious upbringing, education, whether they worked outside the home and their marital status, in addition to other topics. Prior studies have shown that men tend to hold more traditional gender roles than do women, though this gap has narrowed over time.

The researchers looked specifically at gender role views as a predictor of a person’s earnings. They controlled for job complexity, number of hours worked and education. Their analyses showed that men in the study who said they had more traditional gender role attitudes made an average of about $8,500 more annually than those who had less traditional attitudes.

“More traditional people may be seeking to preserve the historical separation of work and domestic roles. Our results prove that is, in fact, the case,” Judge said. “This is happening even in today’s work force where men and women are supposedly equal as far as participation.”

For women, however, the situation was reversed. Women who held more traditional views about gender roles made an average of $1,500 less annually than the women with more egalitarian views. Put another way, if a married couple holds traditional gender role attitudes, the husband’s earning advantage was predicted to be eight times greater than a married couple where the husband and wife have more egalitarian attitudes.

“These results show that changes in gender role attitudes have substantial effects on pay equity,” Judge said. “When workers’ attitudes become more traditional, women’s earnings relative to men suffer greatly. When attitudes become more egalitarian, the pay gap nearly disappears.”

The researchers believe their results show that the gender pay gap is not just an economic phenomenon. “Psychology has an important role to play, too,” said Judge. “Our country’s policies have been leaning toward gender equality for decades now. But, according to our study, traditional gender role views continue to work against this goal.”

Reference

Judge, T. A. & Livingston, B. A. (2008). Is the Gap More Than Gender? A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Gender Role Orientation, and Earnings (PDF). Journal of Applied Psychology, Vol. 93, 994-1012.


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