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23 September 2008
Study finds sexism pays dividends 
The more things change the more they stay the same. 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 liberated views don't make much more than women with a more traditional outlook. Researcher Timothy Judge, from the University of Florida, analyzed data from a study of men and women who were interviewed four times between 1979 and 2005. 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 and education. The researchers looked specifically at gender role views as a predictor of a person's earnings. Their analyses, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, 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." Interestingly, the results also did not fundamentally change when other factors were controlled, such as industry, occupation, hours worked, and number of children. "These results cannot be explained by the fact that, in traditional couples, women are less likely to work outside the home," Judge said. "Though this plays some role in our findings, our results suggest that even if you control for time worked and labor force participation, traditional women are paid less than traditional men for comparable work." Related:
Work-Shy Husbands Exposed!
Men Attracted To Subordinate Women
Source: American Psychological Association
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