A study issued last month on gender roles and salary garnered a lot of attention in the blogosphere.  Numerous sites carried summaries (here’s a pretty decent one from the AARP, which happened to be one of the first that came up in Google) and here’s a link to the actual study, for those who want all the details. The short version is that your salary is tied not only to your gender, but to your views about gender: in particular, men who held traditional views about gender (men should be breadwinners, women should stay at home, etc.) earned substantially more than men who held egalitarian views about gender. Egalitarian men earned slightly more than egalitarian women, and egalitarian women, in turn, earned slightly more than the lowest paid group, women who held traditional views about gender. The results appeared to be true even when the researchers adjusted for profession, class, age, etc.

Now, a couple of caveats to keep in mind: the results haven’t been replicated, and often such studies produce different results—sometimes even opposite results—when other researchers attempt to do them again. And while the researchers don’t know how to interpret the results, they have discounted some explanations that might turn out to be not so discountable (for instance, traditionally-minded men might be choosing higher-paying jobs in a way that the researchers did not account for). Still, it’s an interesting result, but one that ought to be greeted with some suspicion. The researchers are clearly on the side of the egalitarians, but their study was probably so widely cited because it confirms a long-standing male suspicion (previous studies have mostly confirmed women’s fears): being a feminist may be good for women (egalitarian women earned more than traditional women, after all), but it won’t be good for me. In particular, it suggests that one possible reason for the salary disparity is that my boss and other important men making decisions at my company will think less of me.

One can imagine the scenarios: all-male management decides to go to a strip club and discuss the Bayerson contract—will they invite Harry, the hirsute, fun-loving, trash-talking guy from Marketing, or Gabe, the skinny, serious HR guy who’s always reminding people to use politically correct language? This is the most crass and obvious scenario, of course, but you can imagine dozens of ways in which men with traditional gender values are more likely to impress a boss who probably holds similar values. So, as egalitarian views are more and more widely held (many studies suggest this is happening), as more “egalitarians” are bosses and get to reward egalitarian views, as more and more women move into management, we can expect to see this gap vanish, right?

Not so fast. The authors of this study also suggest a different possible origin of the pay gap. Perhaps men with traditional gender ideas negotiate better, more aggressively. In short, this is an idea that evolutionary psychology has long suggested: we have evolved multiple “gender strategies” over the eons in order to find mates, compete with others, pass our genes along, prosper, and all the rest. The key, however, is that we have evolved multiple strategies. Some men are aggressive, macho, motorcycle-riding chauvinists; others are bespectacled, sensitive, kid-loving artists. Both types actually appear to do relatively well (the macho guys on motorbikes may do better in the short term, and the quiche-eating guys driving the Prius probably do better over the long term). So it may very well be that aggressive, competitive and traditional men are not just bargaining, but also driving themselves harder at work, and dedicating more time to their jobs, while more egalitarian men are knocking off at five to get back home, taking sick days to care for the kids, and doing all kind of other stuff that may not be maximizing their earning potential (but may be contributing to a happier home life, and more well-adjusted children). Women who subscribe to a traditional mindset, on the contrary, may invest the least amount of time and energy in work, believing that their proper place is at home. We’re mostly in agreement that people doing the same job should be getting paid the same wage, but the point is that not everyone is doing “the same job.”

Academia is perhaps the workplace with the greatest dedication to egalitarian ideas about gender. In the humanities especially much of the workforce is made up of highly educated, non-traditionally minded women. Even here, however, I expect one would find the results of the study hold, although no one is planning to discuss curriculum changes at a strip club. While there might be a subtle bias against “family men,” I suspect that a number of factors—most of which are inevitable—would explain why more traditional men will continue to do better than their more egalitarian colleagues. Simply put, they will dedicate more time and energy to work, and less to family. If I look at department heads, administrators, deans, provosts and the like, I am most likely to see either women with fully grown children, men without children, or men who may espouse egalitarian ideas, but whose actual family organization is one in which the man is primarily dedicated to work, and in which his partner may have a job, but shoulders primary responsibility for other issues, from housework to child rearing. There are exceptions, of course, but my point is that this is not a sexist conspiracy: people who are willing to devote more time to work will, all other things being equal, do better at work.

So am I planning on dropping my “doting dad” routine and becoming a beer-swilling, sexist lout? After all, the study indicates that adopting more traditional gender values would net me about 30% salary increase or more, which would be a rather breathtaking raise! Of course, I couldn’t even if I wanted to, since my views on gender aren’t particularly malleable at my age, and I don’t parent the way that I do out of ideological conviction, but rather based on who and what I am. But the risk of such studies is that they suggest, by tying gender values to a single metric—salary—that one could change gender values and increase salary without some other, concomitant loss. That’s how you do science, of course, by isolating single variables, and I respect that, but let me also suggest that men with traditional gender values might experience not only higher salaries, but also higher levels of stress, higher incidences of heart attacks, and higher rates of divorce. Indeed, it would most interesting to compare not salaries, but total costs and total gains for men and women with traditional and non-traditional ideas about gender. No studies on those issues, of course, but similar results would be consistent with a “Darwinian” understanding of gender as a strategy. But that’s for another post. I’ll just suggest here that a broader understanding of the risks and rewards associated with these very different strategies would indicate that this salary discrepancy might not even be unfair (or not entirely unfair): workers who work more and harder deserve to be paid more, and those who choose to allocate more of their resources to the home may simply be receiving another form of compensation.

So, next time on Inter Alia, the “minority strategy.”