Why women make way less than men do in more religious places
By Stephanie Pappas
Why is there a persistent wage gap between men and women? Turns out, religion may play a
big role in the disparity.
New research finds that the wage gap is 8 percentage points wider in the five most religious
states than in the five most secular, with women making 18% less than men in the least religious states
and 26% less in the most religious. What's more, the gender gap is projected to vanish in 28 years in
the most secular states, compared with a stunning 109 years in the most religious. "If they're in a
religious community, our children are not going to know a world in which they're paid equitably," said
Traci Sitzmann, an associate professor of management at the University of Colorado, Denver. "It's a
little bit scary."
Religion and wages
Sitzmann and her colleague Elizabeth Campbell, an assistant professor of work and
organizations at the University of Minnesota, were interested in exploring the impacts of religiosity on
workforce issues. They started with a global view. Using data from 140 countries, they compared the
likelihood of citizens answering "yes" to the question, "Is religion important in your daily life?" with the
gender wage gap in those countries as of 2013, the most recent global data available. They found a
striking association: The more religious a country, the greater the wage gap. In nations where more
than 95% or more people said religion was important in their daily lives, such as Pakistan and the
Philippines, women earned around 46% as much as men.
In countries where fewer than 20% of people said religion was important to them in daily life,
such as Sweden and Estonia, women averaged around 75% of men's wages. The United States had
moderately high religiosity and women in the U.S. earned 66 cents for every dollar men earned,
Sitzmann told Live Science.
The effect held true for all major world religions, Sitzmann said. It didn't matter if most believers
in a country were Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu or adherants to a folk religion. The wage
gap was still greater in countries where religion played a major role in daily life.
The researchers then turned to Gallup survey data on religious service attendance and the
importance of religion in daily life in the 50 U.S. states. In the U.S. data, the researchers looked only
at full-time wages so as not to skew the results due to women working fewer hours.
They again found that the more religious the state, the greater the wage gap. (Mississippi,
Alabama, Utah, South Dakota and South Carolina were the most religious states; Vermont, Maine,
Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Nevada were the least.) The researchers found that religiosity
explained 17% of the variability in the gender wage gap between states. To ensure that the wider
economy or levels of conservatism weren’t responsible for the difference, the researchers then looked
at year-over-year data between 2008 and 2018 and found that the association between religion and
wages still held. The gender gap is shrinking over time in the U.S., they found, but it is shrinking faster
in secular states compared with religious ones. At current rates, it will take more than a century for the
gap to close in the most religious states.
According to the workplace data analysis company PayScale, women make 81 cents for every dollar men make as of 2020. This analysis compares median salaries for men and women, and does
not control for factors like seniority, years experience and education, all of which can be impacted by
gender discrimination and gender role expectations.
The pathway to a wage gap
Sitzmann and Campbell found three reasons for this difference in wages between secular and
religious regions. The more religious a country or state, the more that society differentiated the roles
of men and women. In other words, women in more religious societies are expected to put family first.
The researchers measured this by looking at how many babies women have, how many women work
at all, access to abortion and family-friendly work policies. In more religious societies, women have
more children, participate less in the workforce, have less access both to abortion and to policies that
help balance work with family.
Religious societies are also more likely to sexually objectify women, the researchers found.
They measured this by looking at regional Google Trends for the search terms "pornography" and
"rape." Both were correlated with religiosity, and both were correlated with the gender wage gap.
Finally, religious societies are also less likely to promote or accept women in leadership
positions. "We've got the Pope saying, 'the door is closed, women are not allowed to be leaders in the
church,'" Sitzmann said, referring to Pope Francis' 2013 statement on female priests in the Catholic
Church. "That sets the stage for a very strong norm."
She and Campbell found that in more religious societies, women have less representation in
politics and in organizational leadership. They also have lower educational attainment and less legal
equality.
Closing the gap
Finally, the researchers conducted experiments to confirm that it was indeed religion, and not
some closely related concept like conservatism, that explained the results. They set up an online game
in which 91 participants, about half women and half men, acted as managers who had to allocate
wages to employees based on performance reviews. All of the participants saw the same performance
reviews, but in some cases the employee was named Patricia Anderson and in others was called
Michael Taylor.
Before seeing the performance reviews, some participants saw a description of the mock
company they were working for that described it as faith-based. Others saw a description that focused
on the company's dedication to communication and community.
Those who were primed to believe they were working for a religious company allocated 3%
more to the male employee compared with the female employee. In contrast, those who thought the
organization was secular allocated 6% more to the female employee.
But there was a way to reverse the inequality. When the researchers told people in the mock
religious company that one of the company values was that women needed to be involved, and that
the company had a strict anti-sexual-harassment policy, it wiped out the gender wage gap, according
to their research paper published Oct. 27 in the Academy of Management Journal.
This was a heartening result, Sitzmann said, because it suggests that simply being aware of
expectations for gender equality will help make people behave more equitably.
Adapted from: https://www.livescience.com/religious-states-wider-gender-pay-gap.html
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