14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the progress made over the past few decades in allowing women access to the same chances that men get at the workplace, ladies still get paid a lot less than men, on average. Scientists in charge of a new study now believe they may have an answer to why that is.
The investigation was carried out by researchers at the University of Chicago, who were able to determine that men tend to be more likely to search for jobs in which competition with others plays a direct role in the monetary compensation they receive monthly.
In other words, men tend to search for challenges more, whereas women tend to settle for jobs that require no competition, but also pay less. Naturally, there are exceptions on both sides of the barricade.
These are not the results of a narrowly-focused study, but of a survey that was carried out in most major urban centers in the United States. One of the most interesting conclusions was that a regional variation appears to exist in women's preferences towards looking for competition-based jobs.
Females are more likely to engage in competition with each other whenever the general level of wages in a city is low. If income rates are generally high, then less competition develops.
“We know that women, often working at the same kind of job as men, frequently are not paid as much as men,” explains the lead author of the new study John List, PhD. The work was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“Some of the explanations for the differences contend they are caused by discrimination or by women leaving the workforce to have children and then returning,” the investigator adds.
“Other people have suggested that men are more attracted to competition than women, and that accounts for the differences,” he goes on to say, quoted by PsychCentral.
“When the salary potential was most dependent on competition, men were 94 percent more likely to apply than women,” List explains. This was a general trend among the 6,779 people that were part of the new survey.
One of the main reasons for this could be the fact that women and men respond differently to pay incentives based on competition. These responses that the two genders display may be based on social cues that are inscribed onto them since they are children.
For example, boys tend to be encouraged to be more competitive, whereas girls are more cooperative. This may have repercussions later on in life as well, and the ripples of this “training” may extended into the way each individual acts as an employee.