Techotic

Timothy Judge, PhD, and Beth Livingston from the University of Florida have published their study in the latest Journal of Applied Psychology. They found that men who believe in what they call traditional roles for women (a woman’s place is in the home, employing wives leads to more juvenile delinquency, a man should be the primary earner and the woman should take care of the home and family) earn more money than men who don’t. This is only true if you are a man, the same do not apply to women.

They analyzed data from a 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.

The researchers looked for gender role views as a predictor of a person’s earnings - not surprisingly, they were able to find them. They controlled for job complexity, number of hours worked and education and their analyses concluded 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.

For women, 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 less traditional 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.”

[via scientificblogging]