Women are not the same as men. That's what I learned from this paper by Marie-Claire Villeval. She's found that men and women choose different ways of being paid.
She asked subjects to solve maze-type puzzles, and offered them two ways of being paid for doing so - a piece rate, according to every maze they solved, or a tournament-rate, which paid a bigger rate only to the person who solved the most mazes.
She found that most men choose the tournament, whereas most women chose the piece-rate. The upshot is that men got paid more than women.
It's easy to see that this difference in preferences can spill out of the laboratory and into the labour market. If men have a greater preference for risky competition-based pay, they will disproportionately enter riskier occupations - management, politics the City - which on average offer higher pay. Maybe, then, gender pay differences really do reflect differences in preferences.
And here's what surprised me. These differences in preferences are not related to differences in either risk appetite or one's opinion about one's ability. Ms Villeval found that men and women scored similarly on both measures. Differences in preferences for pay, then, seem to be genuine gender differences.
Are these differences due to social norms, or to innate biological differences? That's an open question.
A question open to what? How much time should one be willing to piss away inventing a story that explained a genetic predisposition on the y chromosome for tournaments?
Posted by: david | December 20, 2005 at 05:58 PM
"If men have a greater preference for risky competition-based pay, they will disproportionately enter riskier occupations - management, politics the City - which on average offer higher pay."
Perhaps you could explasin how these occupations above are inherently more risky than, say, working for Gate Gourmet, an archetype of the low-paid, low-value work that a large proportion of women seem to 'choose'?
Or do you give any credence to Walby and Olsen's less entertaining (but perhaps more sensible) analysis which suggests that the causes of the pay gap are: occupational and industrial segregation, discrimination, insufficient flexibility to balance work and caring responsibilities, part-time working, and skills deficits?
Posted by: Emma | December 20, 2005 at 06:36 PM
I am reminded of the crack that after twenty years of the experimental economics research program, we are now close to an understanding of the behaviour of economics graduate students taking part in economics experiments.
Posted by: dsquared | December 20, 2005 at 06:40 PM
Chris/Emma:
For any given question of 'nature vs nurture' the correct answer is invariably a bit of both but probably more nuture than nature these days.
Whenever the idea of a genetic predisposition towards anything is raised the first question has to be how, if at all, does this contribute to the survival of the species. In this case, men maybe get a slight edge in competitiveness courtesy of testosterone, women may be slightly predisposed to being more risk averse because, to put it crudely, when it comes to propagating the species they're less expendable than men.
Either way, any effects are marginal at best and much less significant than the social factors Emma outlines.
Posted by: Unity | December 21, 2005 at 12:34 AM
by the way, I really don't think it is possible to conclude from this experiment that the difference is genetic rather than social.
Posted by: dsquared | December 21, 2005 at 06:52 AM
"Women are not the same as men."
The beginning of wisdom.
"I am reminded of the crack that after twenty years of the experimental economics research program, we are now close to an understanding of the behavior of economics graduate students taking part in economics experiments."
Usually the guinea pigs are undergrads. I am sure that my long-ago roommate, who was awoken from a nap with a bad attitude, by a grad student, seriously cocked up the grad student's thesis on game theory.
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Posted by: 香港日聪 | May 16, 2007 at 03:04 AM
Either way, any effects are marginal at best and much less significant than the social factors Emma outlines
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