The Gender Earnings Gap
Introduction
Women on average earn less than men do. In the United States, the ratio of female to male weekly earnings for full-time workers is 0,82 (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017). It has been calculated by dividing the median weekly earnings of all women working full-time by the median weekly earnings men make working full-time. This ratio and, clearly a gap, have been derived after comparing women of all races and ethnicities to men of all races and ethnicities (AAUW, 2018). Different countries report different own numbers of what’s the difference between men’s and women’s wages, but all those scale up to about +/- 20% in difference. Legal Aspects of the Gender Pay Gap of European Commission defines the wage gap as the difference between the average pay level of male and female employees respectively (European Commission, 2007: 6).
This case of a gender earnings gap, its explanations, and various theories have been a subject of discourse in scientific and general social domain for years already, none up to this date having found its real cause of existence. It is partly also because existing earnings gap is not easily researchable to be simply debunked and explained, and it is also a fertile ground for different socio-political debates often being pushed through by political actors, celebrities and others for different personal or other interests. Whether extremist-rightists, leftists, radical feminists,... – those groups’ explanations are often only descriptive, conflicting and non-scientific and do not offer common satisfactory explanation of the existence of a gender earnings gap. The standard and accepted explanation as to why there is the gap, as cited in Watson, 2010; Corrnell & Bernard, 2007, suggests this must be a function of institutional/societal level sex-based discrimination (Jonason, Koehn, Okan, & O'Connor, 2018). Such discriminatory practice has been banned - in the U.S., it is written in Equal Pay Act passed by Congress in 1963. UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights from 1948 states that everyone should, without any discrimination, have the right to be paid equally for the same kind of job. Despite that, there’s still an ongoing opinion that solely one’s gender may hold for the main, if not only, reason for the gap. This paper formulates a research question and tries to answer it by providing findings from various literature sources from disciplines of economics, psychology and biology. Afterwards, the direction of future research and its methods are suggested.
Problem statement & research question
According to the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, there is no country where men and women are fully equal (UN News, 2015). To conclude that this difference is merely because of gender; prejudices or oppression, let alone sexism - would be too simplistic for there are many different factors that drive wages. One of those factors is also gender, but it’s not the only one. Since on one hand paying men and women differently for doing the same job is discriminatory and forbidden by law, why then on the other hand, even in developed countries, this gap exists? As a fight for gender equality has come so far and produced so many positive results on numerous other aspects, how come important aspect such as pay for living isn’t gender equal? What is meant by other aspects is e.g. increasing number of women coming into high offices, women now driving independently of men in Saudi Arabia, etc. The research question of this paper is:
What factors cause a gender earnings gap?
In the paragraphs that follow, some of those major factors and their influence on gender earnings gap will be analyzed, based on the studies found.
Men and women make different choices
Men and women tend to choose different kinds of jobs, different career choices overall and even differ in the work within the same profession. Women are disproportionately represented in education, office and administrative support, and health care occupations. Men are disproportionately represented in construction, maintenance and repair, and production and transportation occupations (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2018e). Stoet & Geary (2018) found that men also tend to gravitate more towards STEM fields - science, technology, engineering, mathematics. Men are also dominant in the more dangerous professions and are more likely to be killed at work with fatality rates 10 times that of women: 5.7 per 100,000 vs. 0.6 per 100,000 for women (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2017). One of the main findings of Stoet & Geary (2018) is that, paradoxically, countries with lower levels of gender equality had relatively more women among STEM graduates than did more gender equal countries. William & Geci (2015) state this is a paradox because gender-equal countries are those that give girls and women more educational and empowerment opportunities, and generally promote their engagement in STEM (Willian & Geci, 2015).
Furthermore, the U.S. Department of Labor issued a paper in 2009 that examined more than 50 peer-reviewed studies and concluded that the .23 wage gap may be almost completely the result of individual choices being done by workers of both genders (U.S. Department of Labor, 2009). Georgetown University periodically publishes “The economic value of college majors” where the difference in choices is visible in the list of best-paying college majors and the percentage of men and women having their degrees in those majors. In the latest report, the best-paying majors were largely dominated by males, whereas the situation was exactly the opposite for the worst paying majors dominated largely by women. Women earned less in all majors except for three (Carnevale, Melton, & Strohl, 2011).
Even within the same profession, men and women tend to make different career choices that impact the amount of earnings they receive. A study conducted by Harvard’s Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel has found that earnings gap can be explained by the fact that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. It is because women have greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for overtime work hours than men. These gender differences are consistent with women taking on more of the household and childcare duties than men, limiting their work availability in the process (Bolotnyy & Emanuel, 2018). The root of those different choices, according to Harvard’s findings, is that of a fact that women value time and flexibility more than men. From the perspective of evolutionary psychology, this can be due to biologically predetermined features of women always having taken primary care of infants who are exceptionally vulnerable, being more protective and careful towards them (M?ller, Majdand?i?, de Vente & B?gels, 2012).
But the important question that then arises is what are those factors that cause women to choose “lower-paid” jobs? Are communities they reside/grew up in is not egalitarian, stimulating, or encouraging enough for women? Is perhaps the media blocking women through its channels? Are societies universally patriarchal? The following paragraph provides insights from Swedish, Australian, and some other studies.
The role of the personality
Firstly, meta-analyses show that men and women are more similar than they are different; they are basically alike (APA, 2005). But, according to Peterson (2018), small differences at the population level turn into large differences at the extremes. For example - men and women are broadly similar with regards to aggression, although men lean a little bit more towards aggression. If a random person would be picked out of the population, both genders included, and the guess would be that the male person is the one more aggressive, this guess would be correct 60% of the time. But, if 1 in 100 most aggressive people would be taken out of a population - they would all be male. That is also the reason why the majority of the people in prisons are male, according to Peterson (2018). Also, Aronson, Wilson & Akert (2015) state - most cases of extreme violence in the family are perpetrated by men. 8 in 10 murderers who kill a family member are male (Aronson, Wilson & Akert, 2015: 381). These examples are used to illustrate the following: on average, psychologically, men are more interested in things, whereas women are in people (Beltz, Swanson & Berenbaum, 2011). It is the extremes that make a difference; hence - e.g. for one to become an engineer, one must be heavily interested in things, and most of those people are men, as previously mentioned that males dominate the STEM occupations. While on the other hand, for one to become a social scientist or a nurse, one needs to have great interest in people. This is largely due to hormonally-influenced psychological characteristics – and therefore cannot be re-done by social practices (Beltz, Swanson & Berenbaum, 2011).
In their article, The role of personality in individual differences in yearly earnings, authors examined the role domain-general personality traits play in accounting for variance in income in Australia. What the multi-varied analysis found was that personality traits such as (dis)agreeableness, narcissism, psychopathy, extraversion, conscientiousness, and limited neuroticism predicted higher earnings (Jonason, Koehn, Okan & O'Connor, 2018). Men and women differ in those personality traits, which work in favor of men when it comes to better paying job selection (Jonason, Koehn, Okan & O'Connor, 2018). For example, men who were more narcissistic and women who were less neurotic and less agreeable (less kind and compassionate) reported more yearly earnings (Jonason, Koehn, Okan & O'Connor, 2018). Jason et al (2012, 2014) suspect these traits influence downstream factors like job choice, behaviors, and satisfaction that influence earnings differently in men and women (Jonason, Koehn, Okan & O'Connor, 2018). That does not mean, however, that e.g. agreeableness means one is just ‘not good enough’ for the job. As Peterson (2018) points out - it depends on the kind of a job - being agreeable will probably work in favor of a person who works with people and where compassion and caring are those traits that facilitate interpersonal care. Peterson (2018) says psychologists have perfected the measurements of personality over the last thirty years with advanced statistical models to the point that today such studies can be done with high reliability.
Perhaps the most surprising and unexpected findings come from Scandinavia. Recently published Swedish paper, Sex differences in personality are larger in gender equal countries: Replicating and extending a surprising finding (2018) has found that sex differences in personality increase with the gender equality index (Mac Giolla & Kajonius, 2018). Figure 1. shows the correlation between a country’s sex differences in personality and a country’s gender equality. Increasing values on the X-axis indicate greater sex differences in personality, based on the multivariate measure of effect size Mahalanobis D. Increasing values on the Y-axis indicate greater gender equality (Mac Giolla & Kajonius, 2018: 3).
Figure 1. The correlation between country sex differences in personality and a country gender equality index
The results indicate that women are typically more worried (neuroticism), social (extraversion), inquisitive (openness), caring (agreeableness) and responsible (conscientiousness) than men, and that these differences become larger in more gender equal countries. As gender equality increases, both men and women gravitate towards their traditional gender roles. It is surprising to discover that the effect is going in the opposite direction of what was actually expected. Similar statistical models were used in numerous other studies cross-countries on a large sample. Men and women were offered to do validated preference and personality tests, which were afterwards rank-ordered by wealth and egalitarian social policies. Evidence indicates, as seen in Falk & Hermle (2018) - that higher levels of economic development and gender equality are associated with stronger gender differentiation in preferences (Falk & Hermle, 2018: 11).
Other factors influencing the earnings gap
However, not all gender wage injustice can be explained by different career choices and personality traits, as discrimination and bias against women are also culprits in the wage gap (AAUW, 2018). Each year, the American ‘Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’ receives thousands of sex, race, and other pay discrimination complaints, and many of these are decided or resolved in favor of the person who filed the charge (U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 2018b). Socialization, upbringing, and culture also affect to some extent the way people’s ideas, values and choices are shaped (Fanuko, 2008). Along with already mentioned parameters driving wages, some other, though no less important ones, include education, efficiency, occupation, position in an organization, hours worked per month, hours worked on holidays, hours worked on Sundays (Naki?, 2018) and hence have an indirect impact on the gender earnings gap.
Conclusion and Future research
The gender earnings gap exists due to many factors influencing it and many factors driving wages. The true reason, however, for its existence remains unknown, because there are too many factors and variables that drive wages that no single study over a sufficient space and time can cover them all. Put differently, no single study has yet been designed to be able to cover all those factors. Those numerous parameters include age, interests, education, efficiency, occupation, position in an organization, hours worked per month, hours worked on holidays/Sundays, personality, etc. It is clear, judging by the complex nature and roots of those factors why this is a multi-varied, hardly researchable subject. However, some important conclusions can be extracted. As the findings presented above show - the more the society is egalitarian and allows freedom of choice, as seen in the case of Scandinavia, the more men and women gravitate towards traditional gender occupations. As the socio-cultural ground is minimized, the biological differences become maximized. The conclusion that may come out from this is that equality of opportunities does not lead to equality of outcome. And it is towards the equality of opportunities for which policies should be aiming for and where social engineering may have an effect.
Further research should, firstly, build upon current methodological models and do more personality tests using The Big Five, or similar models of high reliability in various countries over a larger time span. By doing so, and in the meanwhile when doing the tests, more countries will progress in terms of gender equality in other aspects (not only pay), and it will then be possible to see whether the case of Scandinavia was just a trend or not. However, such statistical studies that have been done so far show a correlation between X and Y, in this case, e.g. egalitarian index and personality differences, but social phenomena is driven by multiple parameters. Which means we cannot claim for sure that just because X is such as it is, that then Y must be the consequence of X (because personality differences in genders grow only because the country is very egalitarian, or that gender choices differ only because a country is economically very developed). It could be, perhaps, that in less gender-equal/economically developed countries women “need” to behave more “non-feminine” in order to be able to succeed for society simply does not allow them to act differently. Having said that, further research should, secondly, focus on searching beyond causality of X to Y. E.g. Gender equality index being the main cause of growing personality differences, as well as economic development of a country being the cause of different occupational choices among genders. Further research should focus on finding and incorporating more parameters in statistical or other research models that would deepen understanding of the causality of the phenomena currently presented in this paper. Afterwards, findings should continuously be compared to the results of previous years and it will enable contemplation in which direction numbers are going - whether the gap is shrinking/expanding due to what personality traits or whatever other parameters. One suggestion thus would be to look in the field of socialization and its correlation to country’s socio-economic situation and development. Apart from that, further research should also be conducted on other wage-driving-factors mentioned in the paper on large samples in multiple countries to see how trends are changing/abiding. Analyzing and researching gender equality, and wages, in this case, is a long term process and should be addressed as such.
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