Is the Gap More Than Gender? A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Gender Role Orientation, and Earnings (PDF; 180 KB)
Source: Journal of Applied Psychology (via American Psychological Association)
From press release:

When it comes to sex roles in society, what you think may affect what you earn. 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 egalitarian views don’t make much more than women with a more traditional outlook.

Timothy Judge, PhD, and Beth Livingston from the University of Florida, analyzed data from a nationally representative 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. Results were published in the September issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.

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, education, whether they worked outside the home and their marital status, in addition to other topics. Prior studies have shown that men tend to hold more traditional gender roles than do women, though this gap has narrowed over time.

The researchers looked specifically at gender role views as a predictor of a person’s earnings. They controlled for job complexity, number of hours worked and education. Their analyses 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.

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