I hope I’m not the only person who raised an eyebrow to this article on the gender wage gap. This first part isn’t necessarily a surprise:
Men with egalitarian attitudes about the role of women in society earn significantly less on average than men who hold more traditional views about women's place in the world, according to a study being reported today.
It is the first time social scientists have produced evidence that large numbers of men might be victims of gender-related income disparities. The study raises the provocative possibility that a substantial part of the widely discussed gap in income between men and women who do the same work is really a gap between men with a traditional outlook and everyone else.
The differences found in the study were substantial. Men with traditional attitudes about gender roles earned $11,930 more a year than men with egalitarian views and $14,404 more than women with traditional attitudes. The comparisons were based on men and women working in the same kinds of jobs with the same levels of education and putting in the same number of hours per week.
Ah, we wander into the little bubble of reality where I can claim some competence as a thinker. From everything that I understand about the gendered economy, I could’ve predicted this response. But I didn’t, and so these guys got the “big find I got cited in the Post” honors. Good on them, and I’ll cede the floor so they can interpret their findings.
"Some would say, 'Of course traditional men earn more than traditional women -- they are both fulfilling their desires to play different roles in the home and workplace,' " said Judge, emphasizing that the researchers compared working men with working women, not working men with women who stay home. "Our results do not support that view. If you were a traditional-minded woman, would you say, 'I am fine working the same hours as a traditional-minded man in the same industry with the same education but earning substantially less'? I don't think traditional-minded women would say that."
[…]
Livingston and Judge said there are two possible explanations: Traditional-minded men might negotiate much harder for better salaries, especially when compared with traditional-minded women. Alternatively, it could also be that employers discriminate against women and men who do not subscribe to traditional gender roles.
"It could be that traditional men are hypercompetitive salary negotiators -- the Donald Trump prototype, perhaps," Judge said. "It could be on the employer side that, subconsciously, the men who are egalitarian are seen as effete."
Livingston, a doctoral candidate in management, added: "People make others uncomfortable when they disconfirm stereotypes -- we don't know how to interpret them."
Um… no.
The authors are right to note that women who adhere to traditional gender roles, especially career women, would think it wrong to be denied equal pay for equal work, but Livingston and Judge pay too much attention to attitudes as being a determinant.
It would seem that there’s a fairly strong correlation not between attitudes, but in contributions to the economy of the household. The person adhering to the gender role that contributes the least amount of work to social reproduction is the one who has the advantage in the realm of the formal economy. I look at those numbers and I see the economic costs of cooking, cleaning, and taking the kids to the doctor for both women and men.
The explanations put forward remain firmly focused on individual variations and miss the bigger picture. Traditional-minded men bargain harder and better? I don’t buy that for a second. You’d have to develop a metric for bargaining ability that didn’t rely on monetary success as an indicator. At any rate, I don’t think some mythical “bargaining ability” is differentially distributed between men and women or between those who adhere to different gender roles. The second hypothesis, that managers subconsciously perceive more feminist men as “girly men,” similarly seems to assume a little too monolithic mindset amongst that population.
Essentially, what we’re seeing is a subsidy that enables men to single-mindedly devote themselves to their careers, for various reasons putting them at a distinct advantage to those who attempt to strike a more equitable balance between work and family. For the method geeks, I didn’t notice any mention that they controlled for marital status and/or number of children, and I’d be interested to know if there were some interesting multiplier effects among some of the variables (adherence to traditional gender roles X gender; adherence to traditional gender roles X marital status, among others). That the authors went with seemingly implausible explanations suggests not seeing the forest for the trees. But whatever – I’m glad they’re interested in the problem, even if I think they’re barking up the wrong tree. But wait.
Parents looking at the study might be tempted to inculcate their sons with traditional gender views with an eye to greater financial success, but the researchers warned that this would come at their daughters' cost -- traditional-minded women suffer the greatest income disadvantage for doing the same work.
"Traditional values," Judge said, "do not have to be traditional gender-role values."
That the Post would jump to the cheap locker room guffaw of “maybe we should train our boys to keep women barefoot and pregnant” and that the authors would respond with a liberal piety worthy of its own bumper real estate just seems offensively hokey.
4 comments:
Very interesting. I don't know if I agree with your criticism though, mainly because "[t]he comparisons were based on men and women working in the same kinds of jobs with the same levels of education and putting in the same number of hours per week."---the last part especially. One would assume that if traditionalist men were more single-minded about work, that they'd work more hours, and yet the study has (supposedly) accounted for this.
By the way, I've found a copy of the paper at one of the author's website: http://bethlivingston.net
According to the paper, they did control for marital status and number of children (and a few other things!). There is one issue that the paper mentions early on which they did not control for: geography. The idea is that Southerners and those in rural areas are more likely to be traditionalists; how this might confound the results, I'm not sure.
I do have one hypothesis: perhaps the causality is in reverse; that is, getting paid more than one's peers makes one feel more patriarchal.
That's the thing - there's no variable that catches the amount of work being done in the home. Let me see if I can explain this with an example.
Let's assume that traditionally-minded people are likely to end up together. Let's also assume that we have a couple of traditionally-minded corporate lawyers with identical backgrounds, starting at the same position with the same salary. This couple are type As, putting 60+ hours on average in the office each week, and they have two children at home with a nanny.
The fact remains that there is still a ton of household management to be done - dealing with the nanny, being the executive in the kitchen, acting as the social director for the family (important emotional work for maintaining social cohesion), and any number of other small things that at some point must be dealt with in the household. And in a traditionally-minded relationship, these responsibilities would rest primarily, perhaps even solely, with the woman.
The household responsibilities intrude on the little things that make a difference in one's professional life. An important meeting may be missed to pick up a sick child from school. Sending thank you notes takes time away from really paying attention to the news so you can be "on top of things" in the office tomorrow. In this scenario, the distractions disproportionately fall on the woman to deal with. Meanwhile, in the office, her husband, as evidenced by the income data, is doing much better.
This is what I meant by subsidizing the man's ability to focus on his job. The woman's ability to advance is hampered by the pinprick leaks of time dedicated to household management. The man simply doesn't have those demands on his time.
Does that make sense?
I see. Yes, that makes sense, and it does seem plausible to me. But the differential (traditional vs. egalitarian) men is much, much larger than for (egalitarian vs. traditional) women. I'd assume that if housework is a strong factor, the difference should be nearly the same. Or is there some reason I'm not seeing that the impact should be greater for men than for women?
The paper does state that when one controls for the types of jobs that the 4 types choose, the difference lessens somewhat (pp. 29-30), but either they aren't precise with "somewhat" or I didn't understand their computations. It's possible that when taking this into account, the effect of gender role orientation is pretty similar in both men and women. But the difference is so stark to begin with: $1500 for women, but $8500 for men (dollar amounts refer to the difference in mean income for people 2 standard deviations apart on their gender orientation scale; see p. 62).
The wage disparity between the gender role classifications within the genders suggests a meaty workplace ethnography project that almost makes me wish I was a pro sociologist again. To me it suggests a sanction against men who buck hegemonic masculinity. The differences between the two classifications of women might be explained by the relative load of the housework in a relationship. On the male side, however, it would seem that there's something more going on - that putting family on a par with work is more severely looked down upon in a man, and that I imagine playing out in office gossip and small-talk that gets around and colors his subsequent career prospects.
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