A new study led by Cate Taylor, associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, reveals that people may devalue women-dominated occupations not because of the nature of those occupations, but rather because those jobs have a relatively high share of women.
Along with co-authors from New York University, the University of Haifa in Israel, Tel-Aviv University in Israel, and New York University Abu Dhabi, Dr. Taylor developed an experiment that presented respondents with an occupation composed of different percentages of women and asked what they thought that job should pay. The authors selected management consulting as their test occupation since the field is relatively gender-neutral.
Respondents who were told the management consulting occupation was 25 percent women suggested a mean salary of $55,403, while those who were told the occupation was 67 percent women suggested a mean salary of $54,478. Participants who were informed the job was 45 percent women suggested a slightly higher salary of $55,533. Notably, respondent gender had no impact on salary recommendation, with both men and women participants suggesting lower pay when presented with information suggesting management consulting was women-dominated.
“I think it’s important that employers understand that they themselves — well-meaning individuals — sometimes devalue women without thinking about it,” said Dr. Taylor. “The pay gap is not about some inherent preference in women for jobs that offer lower wages, but rather it is that we actually do pay women’s occupations less because we devalue women. Having that message out there is valuable.”
A UC Santa Barbara faculty member since 2018, Dr. Taylor specializes in gender, work, health, reproduction, survey and experimental methods, social psychology, and biomarkers of stress. She received her bachelor’s degree in economics from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and both her master’s degree in human development and her Ph.D. in sociology with a minor in feminist, gender, and sexuality studies from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.