Melissa J. Williams

I once held an entry-level job in an organization where the majority of managers were women. One day, while discussing a particularly attractive candidate for a supervisory role, one of the managers sighed, “Well, he’s a man, so we’ll have to pay him more.” At the time, I was shocked that this otherwise egalitarian female manager would seemingly endorse the gender gap in wages. But to hear her explain it, she was simply acknowledging the reality—not the appropriateness—of men’s higher overall salaries, and preparing herself to budget more money in anticipation of hiring of a male employee. This example captures the way that people may adjust their behavior to anticipate social realities, regardless of whether they agree with them. Unfortunately, such accommodation can have the effect of reinforcing an unequal status quo, particularly when it happens outside of conscious awareness.

The gender gap in wages is an example of a social reality that few people explicitly support, but that is nonetheless reinforced by small-scale, seemingly innocuous decisions at the interpersonal level. My research suggests that gender bias in one such decision can be tied to stereotypes about maleness and wealth. Both men and women, many of whom try to avoid being prejudiced in their daily lives, show evidence of male-wealth stereotypes, which can be implicated in decisions that reinforce pay inequities. This process, like most stereotyping, can occur outside of conscious awareness. Thus each of us may perpetuate the pay gap on a day-to-day basis without knowing that we are doing so. If we are to lay the groundwork for gender equality in pay, we must first take ownership of our potential to behave in a manner that is inconsistent with our personal values.

Money as Masculine

In our research, Betsy Levy Paluck of Princeton University, Julie Spencer-Rodgers of the University of California–Santa Barbara, and I hypothesize that the aggregate-level gender gap in wages is reinforced by a male-wealth stereotype held by individuals (Williams, Paluck, and Spencer-Rodgers 2010). Based on repeated patterns borne out in their personal experiences, individuals observe that men tend to earn higher salaries and manage more personal wealth than women do. Eventually, these conscious observations, as in the example at the beginning of this column, may become internalized, automatic, and largely unconscious. As a result, many people associate the concepts of money and wealth more strongly with maleness than with femaleness—that is, they hold a male-wealth stereotype. Data we collected through a series of laboratory studies suggest that this stereotype exists among both men and women, and that most people are not aware that they hold it. When many people think about men, they also unknowingly think about money.

More troublesome is the relationship between this male-wealth stereotype and salary decision making. In our series of studies, we asked participants to estimate the salaries that a variety of men and women earned in different jobs. Like previous researchers (Diekman and Eagly 2000; Eagly and Steffen 1984), we found, based on the aggregated results, that participants estimated male salaries at higher levels than female salaries. Using an established reaction-time task known as the Implicit Association Test (Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz 1998), we also measured each person’s male-wealth stereotype by looking at the speed with which he or she links gendered terms (“man” vs. “woman”) with wealth-related words (such as “rich”). The results showed that the more readily a research participant linked male terms with wealth-related words (that is, held a male-wealth stereotype), the larger the gender gap between the salaries he or she allocated. Interestingly, participants were not generally aware that they were relying on stereotypes in their salary decisions or even that they were showing any bias at all. These studies represent laboratory-based simulations of how the gender gap in wages perpetuates itself through people’s everyday decisions about what salaries are appropriate for whom—decisions that are played out in individual lives.

When Nonconscious Beliefs are More Powerful than Conscious Ones

Should we really be concerned that research participants estimate men’s salaries to be higher than women’s? After all, men do earn more than women overall. Keep in mind, though, that participants typically did not realize that they had estimated higher salaries for men, as the discrepancy only revealed itself when we aggregated individual salary estimates across multiple target employees. Moreover, when we asked participants across several studies to estimate the size of the actual gender wage gap, we found that individual estimates varied considerably. Several participants insisted that women make as much as, or more than, men. Even more telling, participants’ estimates of the wage gap showed no relationship to their estimates of how much individual men and women earn. This indicates that people were not basing their estimates of individual salaries on any conscious understanding of the real gender gap in wages. Instead, as described above, they appeared to be drawing on nonconscious associations between maleness and wealth.

This finding is problematic for efforts to resolve salary inequity. If salary decisions are based in large part on nonconscious factors, it will be difficult for hiring managers to behave in ways that are consistent with their conscious nonsexist ideals, or even with labor laws against wage discrimination. Social psychologists have long known that people have far less conscious access to the reasons for their decisions than they believe they do. This is particularly true of decisions that are influenced by stereotypes, to which most of us would like to believe ourselves resistant. Yet the evidence indicates that well-intentioned people who don’t see themselves as prejudiced can be just as vulnerable to stereotypic associations as those who are more explicitly biased.

Stereotypes arise because lay people are astute observers of their social worlds. We all take in information—again, often without being aware of it—about the different roles that groups (women, African Americans, teachers) play in society. Whether a stereotype is true, or whether one agrees with it, may be irrelevant: If it is part of a person’s culture, it may affect his or her decisions, even without his or her knowledge.

Implications and Solutions for Pay Disparities

The bad news that arises from the research on nonconscious stereotyping is that individuals can be unwitting conduits of their social environments. People note and replicate what they see, without knowing that they are doing so. Social psychologists argue that this is one reason that gender, racial, and other forms of inequality are so pervasive and intractable, in spite of widely endorsed egalitarian beliefs and social norms against sexism, racism, and other types of bias. Discrimination in salary decision making is likely perpetuated not by a few powerful individuals with misogynist agendas, but rather by many well-intentioned men and women who do not see themselves as biased. Each person can contribute to the gender gap in wages via the everyday, individual decisions we make about our own salaries (for example, the compensation we request when negotiating) and those of others (such as the advice we give students entering the work world).

The good news is that robust evidence suggests that nonconscious stereotypes can change (Blair 2002; Rudman, Ashmore, and Gary 2001). Each of us can work to act in ways that align with our values of fairness and equality. First, we can seek to make the nonconscious conscious, thereby helping to safeguard against stereotyping by acknowledging our potential for bias and the role that stereotypes may play in our decision making (Gawronski et al. 2008; Blair, Ma, and Lenton 2001). Second, we can improve access to aggregate-level data among both salary allocators and earners, making discrimination easier to detect (Crosby et al. 1986) than it is on a case-by-case level (at which most salary decisions are made). By giving hiring managers personal access to the consequences of their decisions and showing employees an organization’s record for compensating workers, we can provide ongoing feedback about how well-intentioned, individual-level decisions can accumulate to reinforce group-level inequities.

Finally, as educators, we bear the responsibility of being vigilant and deliberate as we mentor a new generation of male and female workers. In advising students about what courses to choose, career paths to take, salaries to demand, or offers to reject, we must be cautious about relying solely on our intuition and experience in assessing what “feels right” for a particular student. Our gut instincts, while frequently a guide to good decisions, are also fertile ground for stereotypes. By backing up our recommendations to students with careful thought and up-to-date data, we can help erase wage gaps rather than unintentionally perpetuate an unequal status quo.

References

Blair, I.V. 2002. The malleability of automatic stereotypes and prejudice. Personality and Social Psychology Review 6(3): 242-261.

Blair, I.V., J.E. Ma, and A.P. Lenton. 2001. Imagining stereotypes away: The moderation of implicit stereotypes through mental imagery. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(5): 828-841.

Crosby, F., S. Clayton, O. Alksnis, and K. Hemker. 1986. Cognitive biases in the perception of discrimination: The importance of format. Sex Roles 14(11/12): 637-646.

Diekman, A.B. and A.H. Eagly. 2000. Stereotypes as dynamic constructs: Women and men of the past, present, and future. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 26(10): 1171-1188.

Eagly, A.H. and V.J. Steffen. 1984. Gender stereotypes stem from the distribution of men and women into social roles. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46(4): 735-754.

Gawronski, B., R. Deutsch, S. Mbirkou, B. Seibt, and F. Strack. 2008. When "just say no" is not enough: Affirmation versus negation training and the reduction of automatic stereotype activation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology  44(2): 370-377.

Greenwald, A.G., D.E. McGhee, and J.L.K. Schwartz. 1998. Measuring individual differences in implicit cognition: The implicit association test. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 74, 1464-1480.

Rudman, L.A., R.D. Ashmore, and M.L. Gary. 2001. "Unlearning" automatic biases: The malleability of implicit prejudice and stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81(5): 856-868.

Williams, M.J., E.L. Paluck, and J. Spencer-Rodgers. 2010. The masculinity of money: Nonconscious stereotypes predict gender differences in salary estimates. Psychology of Women Quarterly 34, 107-120.

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