Published: September 27, 2008 10:12 pm            

STEPHANIE SALTER: The gender wage gap includes equality-minded men, too

TERRE HAUTE — Lost in the drama of the nation’s tottering finances this past week was another economy-related story. It doesn’t carry the punch of a $700 billion bailout, but the questions it raises about the U.S. workforce are intriguing.

In 1979, a division of the U.S. Department of Labor began tracking more than 12,600 Americans, ages 14 to 22, to determine a variety of things about their employment history. Among those things were income and social attitudes.

Using more than 25 years of data from this group, organizational psychologists from the University of Florida discovered a fascinating correlation: Men who tend to harbor so-called traditional attitudes about women in society earn considerably more money than do men and women in similar fields who hold so-called egalitarian attitudes. Traditional-minded women earn the least of anyone.

Traditional? Egalitarian?

You know, traditional like, “The man is the head of the household. He is the breadwinner. A woman’s place is in the home.” And egalitarian like, “All people are created equal and deserve equal opportunity and equal pay for equal work.”

Everybody’s known for a long time that there’s a wage gap between women and men. Nationally, the disparity looks like this: Women earn about 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. (In Indiana, it’s worse, 73 cents.)

The traditional-minded among us see nothing wrong with that gap. It reflects their view that men are always supposed to be on top (wage-wise, anyway). They blame many of society’s ills on feminists and anyone else who does not hold sacrosanct the Cleaver Family configuration: Ward at work, Wally and the Beav at school, and June (in heels and pearls) at home vacuuming.

Other people — the egalitarian-minded among us — see the gap as a shameful reflection of a sexist society that powers its economy with the labor of women who are paid as second-class citizens.

Former Indiana first lady Maggie Kernan recently called the gender wage gap “the ugly underside” of women’s critical role in the U.S. labor force.

As she wrote in an online opinion piece, “62 percent of women across this country earn at least half of their family’s income,” but “pay discrimination against women happens at all levels, from non-high school graduates to women with doctorates. No woman is immune.”

The University of Florida study indicates that maybe some men are not immune, either. While unequal pay for equal work comes with the territory of being female, it also appears to be tied to cultural attitudes about economic equality held by both genders. Or, as the headline on a Medical News Today story about the study proclaimed:

“Sexist Men Earn More.”

Cautionary note: The Florida study indicates that cultural attitudes influence pay inequality, not that they cause pay inequality. Big difference.

Why traditional men out-earn egalitarian men and women — and, definitely, out-earn traditional women — the psychology team could only theorize. Maybe as the expected breadwinner they drive a harder wage bargain. Maybe it’s the work they choose to enter. The largest wage gaps existed in what the researchers called jobs of “low complexity,” which tend to be male-dominated fields.

“Some low-complexity, ‘blue collar’ jobs may become hyper-masculinized and reward those who are the most traditional in terms of gender roles,” said the leader of the Florida team, management professor Timothy Judge, in a UF news release. “There may be a ‘double-whammy’ both in terms of greater employment prejudice and greater actions on the part of employees to conform to traditional roles.”

Nothing in the study asked any of the members of the four categories how important annual earnings are to them, or whether their happiness and self-worth depend on their take-home pay.

That is another survey for another team. But here’s the specific breakdown on the UF study, which was co-conducted by Ph.D. candidate Beth Livingston:

Participants were interviewed four times from 1979 to 2005. Sixty percent of the original 12,686 people hung in for the entire 26 years. The sample was analyzed in two ways — in its entirety and using only people who said they worked outside the home.

At each interview juncture, women and men were asked about their work and income, their education, marital status and their upbringing. They also were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed with such statements as, “A woman’s place is in the home, not the office or shop,” and “Employment of wives leads to more juvenile delinquency.”

The size of the monetary gap varied for the entire sample versus the outside-work sample, but the same pattern held for every analysis: The woman-at-home men out-earned everyone.

Overall, traditional men led egalitarian men by $8,500, and by nearly $12,000 in the working sample. They led egalitarian women by about $10,000 overall and more than $13,000 in the working analysis.

On the bottom of the pile were women who also believe their place is at home. Overall, traditional women’s annual income lagged about $11,000 behind their traditional men with a whopping gap of nearly $14,500 when the women worked outside the home.

For decades some observers have argued that a gender wage gap isn’t really about gender discrimination, it’s about women naturally migrating to lower-paying jobs or part-time jobs because they need/want to tend to their home duties, too.

The Florida psychologists’ study cast doubt on that theory, as well. The team did not look at the giant, 26-year study group and compare female secretaries with male law firm partners. Comparisons were made of incomes in similar job categories as well as job qualifications and hours worked.

The UF researchers also found that the more formal education people had, the more they tended toward egalitarian attitudes. People in the urban northeast were very egalitarian. The most traditional, socially, were people who are married and religious.

Obviously an egalitarian-minded male, Judge said in the UF news release, “Parents should realize that if they want their daughters to be economically self-sufficient and successful, teaching them traditional gender role attitudes hinders that goal.”

If parents don’t want their daughters to be economically self-sufficient, they have the UF study to help define what they do want their girls to attain — a husband who works to keep his woman home.

Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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