Keywords

gender and wage inequity, determinism, social role theory, implicit person theory

Abstract

Despite the rise of dual-income households in the United States and a narrowing of the nation’s gender wage gap, we find that many men and women still prefer the husband to be the primary breadwinner. To help explain intra-marital wage preferences, we argue for a new construct, gender determinism, which captures the extent to which a person believes gender categories dictate individual characteristics. We show that deterministic views of gender increase both intra-marital wage gap preferences and work choices that may perpetuate the gender wage gap. Our results hold in both student and non-student samples, suggesting some endurance of these beliefs. We discuss how our findings contribute to extant research on implicit person theory and gender role theory, and the implications of our findings for gender wage equity.

Original Publication Citation

Tinsley, C. H., Howell, T. M., & Amanatullah, E. T. (2015). Who should bring home the bacon? How deterministic views of gender constrain wage preferences. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 126(1), 37-48.

Document Type

Peer-Reviewed Article

Publication Date

2015

Publisher

Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes

Language

English

College

Marriott School of Business

Department

Marketing

University Standing at Time of Publication

Associate Professor

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