1 Stanford University
2 Princeton University
3 University of California, Santa Barbara
Melissa J. Williams, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; Elizabeth Levy Paluck, Department of Psychology, Princeton University; Julie Spencer-Rodgers, Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara.
We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Institute for Labor and Employment at the University of California and the National Science Foundation Graduate Student Fellowship Program. Previous versions of this research were awarded the Annual Prize for Student Research from the Association for Women in Psychology/Society for the Psychology of Women and a Graduate Student Poster Award at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Also, we thank Cris Arellano, Leslie Arimas, Rochelle Smith Burnaford, Wendy Chu, Skye Fraser, Natalia Garcia, Meena Kim, Anna Rubin, Julie Shah, Xi Sheng, and Melanie Sun for invaluable assistance with data collection.
Abstract
We present the first empirical investigation of why men are assumed to earn higher salaries than women (the salary estimation effect). Although this phenomenon is typically attributed to conscious consideration of the national wage gap (i.e., real inequities in salary), we hypothesize instead that it reflects differential, automatic economic valuing of men and women. In the four studies described here, we demonstrate that the salary estimation effect is present in both student and community samples, is not explained by participants' awareness of real gender inequities in pay, and appears in descriptive tasks (i.e., estimating what men and women do earn; Studies 1 and 2) as well as in a prescriptive task (i.e., determining what men and women should earn; Study 3). Further, the salary estimation effect is best predicted by the degree to which participants hold an automatic stereotype that links men, more than women, with wealth (Study 4). These results suggest that differential estimates of men's and women's salaries, rather than deliberately reflecting reality, instead indicate a male-wealth stereotype that operates largely outside of awareness. We discuss the implications of these results for salary decision making and the unintentional perpetuation of the gender gap in wages.Next: www3.interscience.wiley.com
|
|
