Gender Gaps in Employment Go Deeper Than Women’s Choices

Gender gaps in employment exist in every country in the world. Men, on average, make more money, have more positions of leadership, and are more active in the workforce than women. An article last month by economists in the Wall Street Journal suggests that women freely choose lower-salaried jobs with fewer working hours that earn them less money and that any other explanation is “a myth that won’t go away.” That is, if women were to simply make choices that funneled them into leadership positions and higher paying jobs, or to choose to work as many hours and days as men, then they would make as much money as men do.

Those who make these conclusions fail to appreciate the power of psychology and the fact that behavior cannot be reduced to choices made in a vacuum. They forget the context in which women are making these “choices.” Missing from this analysis of gender employment gaps are at least two fundamental forces that psychology can address. The first has to do with social expectations of men and women that create legitimate barriers for women in the choices that they can make. The second has to do with what are called “masculine defaults” in the workplace. This blog will tackle the first assumption about expectations placed on women; a future blog will cover masculine defaults.

When discussing the causes of the gender gaps in the workforce, economists making the free-choice argument seek to dispel the idea that active discrimination is causing these gaps. But active discrimination is not even necessary to keep women lower in status than men. There only needs to be cultural beliefs that women should bear children and be their primary caretakers to pressure women to take off time from work (or avoid work entirely) so that they may tend to their expected duties at home. These same pressures discourage women from entering high-pressure, high-paying fields. Conversely, men face strong pressures to earn good money and work long hours but not to contribute to important family and household responsibilities. These expectations of women-as-caretakers and men-as-breadwinners are well-documented and well-known, and influence how people view themselves, not just others. As such, these stereotypes can have a profound effect on women’s self-confidence when they try to break out of what is expected of them.

What about women’s “choices” to work fewer hours than men? Women, even in Western, modern countries, are expected to shoulder the burdens of home care and child rearing, and are indeed expected to parent in the first place far more than men. Obviously both men and women are required to make babies, but what is different for men and women is the social pressure and expectation to take on a parenting role. Women who “opt out” of having children have to explain themselves. Men don’t—indeed the phrase “opt out” is almost never applied to men when they choose to not have children. Conversely, when men “opt in” to have children, they face considerable stigma if they remain home to take care of necessary household and family responsibilities.

What about women’s “choices” to stay out of high-paying fields? Despite many initiatives to encourage women into STEM around the globe, women continue to face strong social pressures to avoid science and engineering fields. One study reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) showed that children as young as 6 endorse beliefs that girls are less interested in computer science and engineering than boys, and those girls who endorse those beliefs internalize them by reporting less personal interest in those areas.

If we lived in a world where expectations and pressures for child and home care were just as strong for men as they are for women, then it would make sense to talk about the free choices that men and women make concerning their careers. But that’s a hugely faulty premise.

Indeed, when economists strip away or disavow those expectations for women, for example by considering only those women who pursue careers at the expense of family, then they find that gender differences reduce or disappear. These economists interpret these findings as evidence for the “myth” of the gender gap. That is, if women choose to not raise families, and choose to eschew social expectations of being a caretaker, and choose to forego great social pressures to avoid math and science-oriented fields, then there would be more gender equality.

But to make these choices, women have to overcome a lifetime of powerful expectations that are placed upon them by their parents, their friends, their classmates, their coworkers, their teachers, their bosses, the media, etc. Rather than place the blame of gender employment gaps on women, why not place the blame on the expectations that society forces upon them? If expectations of women became the same as for men—say, by reducing expectations of women as caretakers or, better yet, increasing expectations of men as caretakers—there would be more gender equality. But that requires changing society, not changing the women who are facing the gendered expectations imposed on them. Change can happen; for example, more and more stay-at-home parents are dads. But closing the gender pay gap can happen only by closing these gender expectation gaps.