28, 415434. While gender inequality is manifested in the German labor market, the situation is somewhat different for university students, especially social sciences students. According to conflict theory, society is defined by a struggle for dominance among social groups that compete for scarce resources. Double standards for competence: theory and research. The status value attached to male recipients reproduces gender inequalities in justice judgments of men and women. Am. This is a mandatory requirement to investigate gender bias introduced by the respondents. But this wasnt due to women earning more. The gender gap in pay has remained relatively stable in the United States over the past 20 years or so. (2009, 2011, 2014). doi: 10.1016/j.rssm.2011.12.004, Markovsky, B. For decades now, working women are getting paid less than men. Why should women get less? These results are similar to where the pay gap stood in Fairness judgments of the distribution of earnings. Jasso and Webster (1997) found a so-called just gender pay gapthe difference between earnings evaluated as just for male and female recipientsin a re-analysis of a factorial survey study conducted by Jasso and Rossi in 1974 (Jasso and Rossi, 1977). Multiple linear regression of justice evaluations of vignettes on vignette dimensions by age and education (all samples). The interaction effect in Model 4 is insignificant, meaning that male and female respondents both produced to the same extent a just gender pay gap favoring male recipients in their evaluations. Am. 3 In 2022, Black women earned 70% as much as White men and Hispanic women earned only 65% as much. Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany. 1.) We have this belief as a society that men are better than women. WebThe conflict theory states the idea that conflict between competing interests is the basic, animating force of social change and society in general. Frank, T., and Grimm, C. (2010). The pressure that men feel from their colleagues at work is frustrating because the men want to be on the top and show that they can rule dictate their terms. The gender gap in negotiation may in part explain why women in the United States earned only about 83% of mens median annual earnings in 2021, according to the Institute for Womens Policy Research. A new theory of distributive justice. Res. How impartial are the observers of justice theory? Given the overwhelming male dominance evident in almost every firm in the past century, men have come to see themselves as the dominant sex. While the factorial survey module of the student sample and one population sample were identical, the second population sample used a different module and is used to emphasize the robustness of the findings. Equation (6) includes the vignette dimensions, the structural context (the actual gender pay gap (GPG) and the average earnings per federal state), and the cross-level interaction between the vignette person's gender (genderv) and the gender pay gap in the federal state (GPGfed.state). In this population, it is less likely that gender has status value and therefore is not a relevant characteristic within the justice evaluation process. The contemporary, Gender Wage Inequality And Conflict Theory. Rev. The effect is significantly negative, meaning that the larger the gender pay gap in the federal state was, the larger the gender pay gap produced by respondents' ratings. 84, 339349. Berger, J., Fisek, H. M., Norman, R. Z., and Wagner, D. G. (1985). The questionnaires consisted of the factorial survey module and additional questions on attitudes (after the factorial survey module) and questions on the socio-demographic background of the parents and students' personal situation. . Due to a life course perspective, gender differences in income are analyzed over a period of 24 years. The rewards of the generalized other represent the typical earnings of similar people, while the normative evaluation of whether earnings are too high or too low is located in the comparison between the actual outcomes and the referential outcomes. The analysis was based on factorial survey studies conducted with one student sample and two population samples. doi: 10.1177/001979390606000103. Under the structural condition of resource equality, it is likely that gender has no status value; therefore, gender is unimportant for the evaluation process. doi: 10.1177/0003122416683393. The impartiality (Jasso et al., 2019) of these reflexive judgments is therefore hardly given. Note that alternative estimation with maximum-likelihood estimators leads to the same results. The actual gender pay gap captures the differences in earnings between men and women. Illogical cases are, e.g., medical doctors without a university degree. Siegel, N. A., Stocker, A., and Warnholz, S. (2009). It is likely that people change their attitudes when they leave the university and enter the labor market and unconsciously learn the new inequality structure and thereby change their referential structure. The social sciences students are embedded in a structural context in which relevant resources are not (or less) correlated with gender, and therefore, gender is unlikely to become a status characteristic in their daily interactions. The effects of vocational and university degrees are also significantly negative. Methodenbericht. Psychol. A new representation of the just term in distributive-justice theory: its properties and operation in theoretical derivation and empirical estimation. The just gender pay gap in Germany revisited: The male breadwinner model and regional differences in gender-specific role ascriptions. Observers produced higher gaps in their ratings if they lived in federal states with a high actual gender pay gap. Jasso and Wegener (1997) specify that the just reward depends on reward-relevant factors x, their weights and their combination. The wage gap is an important topic in many sociology classrooms, but it can be difficult to convey the accumulated disadvantage experienced by women and racial/ethnic minorities to students using in-class discussions, lectures, or In sum, age, education, occupation, and the associated earnings provided information on the recipients that all respondents used in their justice evaluation. These discrepancies in pay add up and have real, daily negative consequences for women and their families. Bearing the limitations of this study in mind, the findings provide important insights for sociological justice research, as they show how inequalities influence the justice evaluations of people. WebThe gender wage gap in America is a social problem that has existed since women entered the workforce. Soc. WebConflict theory suggests that men, as the dominant gender, subordinate women in order to maintain power and privilege in society. Figure 1 shows the long-run trends in the gender pay gap over the 1955-2014 period based on two Restricting the results presented in Tables 6, 7 to full-time employees yields similar results (as can also be seen in Models 1 and 4 of Table 8). The results are presented in Table 8. The analysis sample consists of 1,411 respondents3. For women of colour, immigrant women, and women with children, the difference is even greater. 26, 2142. (1977). In the terminology of Berger et al. Table 5 provides the median earnings and gender pay gaps in 2009 for each state separately. Hypothesis 1. Engels suggested that the same owner-worker relationship seen in the labor force could also be seen in the household, with women assuming the role of the proletariat. Therefore, research on this transformation process using survey experiments would be especially useful. Understanding international differences in the gender pay gap. In addition, the propaganda of feminism and denying men by women and stereotyping them by enemies of all women causes many conflicts between two genders which however have to live peacefully and in harmony. The only exception is the gender of the vignette persons, which was not important for students but crucial for the respondents in the two population samples. (1997). 46, 348352. The vignette samples were drawn via a quota design (D-efficient design) under exclusion of illogical or implausible cases (Dlmer, 2007)6. One must bear in mind that the vignettes in the student sample and population sample 1 were designed equally, so differences can be attributed to rating behavior and not to design elements. Making regression tables simplified. If they rated the income as unjust, respondents judged in a second step whether the income was too high or too low. doi: 10.2307/2657396, Keywords: justice evaluations, just gender pay gap, gender inequalities, status beliefs, factorial survey, German-Germany, Citation: Sauer C (2020) Gender Bias in Justice Evaluations of Earnings: Evidence From Three Survey Experiments. doi: 10.1007/s11577-010-0123-0, Liebig, S., Sauer, C., and Schupp, J. Table 9. I argue that the gender bias in justice evaluations of earnings is an experience-based bias that mirrors the gender inequality of the structural context in which individuals are mainly embedded. Experience-based gender bias questions the appropriateness of the accountability principle usually used to identify the fairness of individual negotiations. Although only a share of respondents participate in the labor market, these status differences are shared beliefs in wide parts of society because they have spread throughout the population. In 2022, women earned an average of 82% of what men earned, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers. In all cases, researchers compare median earnings for women versus men. No matter where a man is in the workplace, they are always ranked one step higher than women. WebPresented in the context of this study are several conceptual and theoretical frameworks, as well as examples of empirical literature, which inform, focus, and offer perspective of the study. Assessing the gender gap in just earnings and its underlying mechanisms. Inq. These designs ensure that the influence of vignette dimensions and interaction terms are mutually uncorrelated. Valet, P. (2018). Verdienstunterschiede zwischen Mnnern und Frauen. 5. I use data from one student sample and two random samples of the German population (the two population samples are independent of one another and differ in design and are therefore useful to demonstrate the robustness of the findings). Evaluations differ between male and female students (p = 0.026) but do not differ in population sample 1 (p = 0.406) and population sample 2 (p = 0.360). Multiple linear regression of justice evaluations of vignettes on vignette dimensions and gender of respondent by sample. A. Gender inequalitiesrefer to absolute differences in the treatment and outcomes for men versus women (e.g., the % of CEOS that are men vs. women), that may or may not be deserved.1Gender inequitiesspecifically refer to differences in the treatment and outcomes for men versus women that are undeserved given their merits or contributions doi: 10.1111/ecin.12060, Dlmer, H. (2007). Gender Pay Gap in den Kpfen: Mnner und Frauen bewerten niedrigere Lhne fr Frauen als gerecht. According to the respondents, the vignette persons who have a higher level of formal education should gain higher returns from their work (educational reward). Until relatively recently, women in Western cultures could not vote or hold property, making them entirely dependent on men. Jasso, G. (2007). To investigate how structural differences shape justice perceptions, the following analyses focus on the two population samples. Conflict between the two groups caused things like the Womens Suffrage Movement and was responsible for social change. J. WebSince women are starkly overrepresented in low paid work, it would usually benefit women more dramatically. The gender pay gap refers to the average difference in mens and womens earnings, and is typically adjusted for hours worked. WebAccording to the Institute for Womens Policy Research (IWPR) analysis of the gender wage gap by occupation, despite progress since the 1970s, the median wage for women employed full time in 2010 was only 81% male full time worker, a gap of 19%. doi: 10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.21. In these negotiations it is on the one hand important for employees to formulate claims that yield an appropriate outcome, and on the other hand, supervisors have to evaluate these claims as legitimate. If gender has status value in the eyes of the observer, it will be relevant in the justice evaluation process. Globally, the gender pay gap stands at 16 per cent, meaning women workers earn an average of 84 per cent of what men earn. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). Future research could delve deeper into gender differences by taking into account family structures, motherhood (England et al., 2016), and household responsibilities. Therefore, the findings presented above could reflect age or cohort as well as education effects. In 1963 women earned 59 cents for every dollar a man earned. The interaction coefficient between the gender of the vignette person and the gender of the respondent in Model 2 indicates whether there were differences in rating behavior between men and women. The respondents were randomly assigned to experimental splits. The gender pay gap can be measured in three key ways: by hourly earnings, weekly earnings, and annual income. The factorial survey as a method for measuring sensitive issues, in Improving Survey Methods: Lessons From Recent Research, eds U. Engel, B. Jann, P. Lynn, A. Scherpenzeel, and P. Sturgis (New York, NY: Routledge), 137149. Bull. Stratificat. The hypothesis refers to the question of the existence of a just gender pay gap. I acknowledge funding from the German Research Foundation (grant number: HI 680-4-1) and the Dutch Research Foundation (grant number: 4510-17-024). 2, eds J. Berger, M. Zelditch, and B. Anderson (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company), 119146. However, reflexive justice judgments are based on individuals' own outcomes and are therefore driven by two forces, justice deliberations and self-interest (Younts and Mueller, 2001). ^The data on the average earnings of full-time employees are provided by the Federal Employment Agency (Frank and Grimm, 2010, p. 14). The sampling procedure followed two steps: after sampling the vignettes, they were allocated to different decks (Jasso, 2006) that were randomly assigned to questionnaires that the respondents had to complete. The gender wage gap refers to the difference in earnings between women and men. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Figure 3 shows the transformed b-coefficients of the regression models with the 95% confidence bars for each sample by gender. The observers produce in this case no just gender pay gap. Math. There seems to be general agreement on the importance of these specific characteristics in justice evaluations of earnings; the coefficients are very similar. *Correspondence: Carsten Sauer, carsten.sauer@zu.de, View all It has also been found that career-people of the STEM field with young children face more "work-family" conflict, as the demands of the rigorous STEM field and those of their young children overlap. Models 1 and 2 report the coefficients for the student sample. The actual rewards (gross earnings) are directly given, while the just gross earnings are a hypothetical value observers regard as just for given recipients. The gender wage gap is a measure of what women are paid relative to men. Theory 22, 432444. Usually, the official statistics reporting the unadjusted gender pay gap use the arithmetic mean or the median of hourly or monthly wages of men and women. A second version of this paper has been part of my dissertation (Sauer, 2014b) and is available online as a discussion paper (Sauer, 2014a). Full-time employees directly experience inequalities in their goal-oriented daily interactions at their workplaces. On the justice of earnings: a new specification of the justice evaluation function. In 2022, women earned an average of 82% of what men earned, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers. WebThere is Functionalism, this plays a part because different parts, there are political influences and government role in wage determination. Distributive justice research distinguishes between reflexive and non-reflexive justice evaluations (Jasso, 2007). The third model shows the coefficients of the three-way interaction with respondent's gender for male (2 = 6.17;p = 0.013) and female (2 = 3.60;p = 0.058) respondents separately. J is a function of the actual earnings (A) and the characteristics being evaluated as relevant for the assessment of the just reward. Health Econ. Toward a multilevel distributive justice theory. In other words, respondents produce with their ratings a just gender pay gap favoring men, as found by Jasso and Webster (1997). The respondents of both population samples produced a just gender pay gap favoring male recipients. Sociol. Rev. doi: 10.2307/2095065. Social structure and the paradox of the contented female worker: how occupational gender segregation biases justice perceptions of wages. The factorial survey is a survey experiment that presents the respondents brief descriptions of persons or situations that consist of dimensions (e.g., gender, occupation, education) that vary experimentally in their levels. WebFeminists argue that this erases the categories of gender altogether but does nothing to antagonize the power dynamics reified by gender. Sci. The factorial survey (Auspurg and Hinz, 2014) is a method that permits the detection of gender biases [and more generally sensitive topics, Auspurg et al. doi: 10.1007/s11211-013-0182-2, Schomaker, C. (2010a). Discovering the mechanisms behind why people perceive certain income levels to be appropriate or fair for male and female employees sheds light on these processes. Soc. doi: 10.1037/bul0000135. The just earnings depend on the levels of characteristics observers perceive as important. Sociol. Be sure that. 5:22. doi: 10.3389/fsoc.2020.00022. I thank Stefan Liebig, Peter Valet, and Murray Webster Jr. as well as Guillermina Jasso and the two reviewers for critical comments and helpful suggestions. (2009). Equation (5) was used to estimate the results presented in Table 7. Sociol. Competition, Meritocracy, and Pay and Tenure Outcomes). ^Due to the design, the correlations between the gender dimension and the omitted dimensions are very low, and the exclusion of other dimensions from the analysis does not affect the results. The theory of double standards focuses on these interactions between job-related characteristics, such as competence and performance, and gender (Foschi, 2000); empirical research by Jasso and Webster (1999) shows that these double standards exist in justice evaluations. The gender gap in pay has remained relatively stable in the United States over the past 20 years or so. Talking about men, it is clearly seen that in todays world they held dominant and much higher positions than women. The results in Table 7 provide information on the overall difference between respondents in the student sample and the population samples. 42, 639651. Note that the data from population sample 1 were used for the analysis published in Auspurg et al. On the other hand, the rating task differed between population sample 1 and population sample 2; thus, their similar evaluation patterns indicate reliable results and a robust design. Assuming this evaluation process, the justice evaluation stated in Equations (1) and (2) contains three types of characteristics: categorical variables, abilities and inputs. Nuremberg: Federal Employment Agency. Read the following thought experiment from Philippa Foot and then answers the questions that follow: "Let us consider [] a pair of cases which I shall call Rescue I and Rescue II. (2009, 2014). Despite the changes we have already made in the world, we have not completely solve the problem of gender stratification. Rather, handful believe that the formative system reinforces real perpetuates social inequalities that arise of distinguishing in class, gender, race, and ethnicity. To illustrate the differences in evaluations between samples and male and female respondents the transformed b-coefficients estimated in Equation (5) will be presented in Figure 3. Models 3 and 4 show the coefficients for population sample 1. 46, 227241. Factorial Survey Experiments, Vol. Third, the respondents stated the level of injustice on a 100-point scale. Mobil. How did we get here? The results show that male and female students did not produce a just gender pay gap with their evaluations. First, the focus is on the effect of the gender of the vignette person on the justice evaluations for each sample. (2011). Gender differences in experimental wage negotiations. 175. Gender is a categorical difference between recipients. First, respondents had to judge whether the earnings of a worker were just or unjust. WebIn 2019, men made a median of $57,456, while women made a median of $47,299a wage gap of 18%. doi: 10.1086/226826. 46, 352360. Framework, models, and quantities. If men are more likely to be resource-rich and women are more likely to be resource-poor, observers attach higher status to male recipients and assign higher earnings to the high-status group even though the recipients do not differ in other characteristics. 6. 4. Therefore, not only data on justice perceptions but also information on the interactions of men and women in the workplace and organizations and on the inequality and power structures would be useful. Therefore, this study aims to investigate income trajectories and the differences regarding men and women. Isserstedt, W., Middendorff, E., Kandulla, M., Borchert, L., and Leszczensky, M. (2010). Additional analyses with all respondentsnot restricted to employed respondentssimilar to those presented in Table 8 revealed mixed results. While the findings are reproducible with full population sample 2, they are not reproducible with full population sample 1 (gender pay gap of the federal state is statistically insignificant, although the coefficients have the same sign). WebConflict theory will always exist in the gender wage inequality as long as men believe that they are better than women. Technical report, TNS Infratest Sozialforschung, Mnchen. All three of these theories have different perspectives on why gender exists. Intersectionality - The Feminist Perspective, 29. Both raw and adjusted gender wage gap estimates are highly dispersed in our sample, with values ranging from almost nil to as much as 95% of men wages. First, all interviews in the SOEP-Pretest are programmed as computer-assisted personal interviews, in contrast to the paper and pencil questionnaires mostly used in the main survey. This was due to womens dependence on men for the attainment of wages. We see this take place in many area, however we witness it more in the work place., The theoretical perspective that explains the issue of gender wage gap inequality is the conflict theory.