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Sexist Wage

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Wage and Well-being

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Abstract

Closing wage differentials between the minimum and the maximum, floor and ceiling, has yet to reverse unfair gendered wage differentials. This chapter, on Sexist wages first divides the inequalities faced by women into (i) vertical and (ii) horizontal, meaning between women being (i) under-represented in the better-waged jobs and over-represented in the poorer-waged ones; plus (ii) waged unequally when doing the self-same job as men. The chapter unpacks the possible reasons for both forms of wage inequality, from human capital to sexism. Sexism wins, hands down. Stereotypes of both gender and jobs stubbornly strain the wage-wellbeing relationship for women. Effective and promising remedies for shifting sexist mindsets are not primarily ‘psychological,’ or psychologised. Instead, they include organisational levers like quotas for (i) vertical wage equality, and living wage policies for (ii) horizontal wage equality.

I’ve always said that I thought equal pay gets you a long way to be treated equally by a man. (Actor Dame Diana Rigg, speaking to BBC Newsnight ahead of the Women of the World Festival at London’s Southbank Centre, 2019)

Productive employment and decent work are key elements to achieving a fair globalization and poverty reduction. The ILO has developed an agenda for the community of work looking at job creation, rights at work, social protection and social dialogue, with gender equality as a cross-cutting objective. (ILO, 2021b, p. 1, emphasis added)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Melamed also pre-corrected wage for chronological age, for details see Melamed (1995, pp. 302/3).

  2. 2.

    My discussion is restricted to group associations reported in the research. It does not extend to individual differences (for reasons in Schimmack, 2021)

  3. 3.

    I am extremely grateful to Sue O-Shea and Jeff Sissons for their expertise and kind conversation on these topics

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. UNESCO Chair on Sustainable Livelihoods/School of Psychology, Massey University, Auckland, New Zealand

    Stuart C. Carr

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Carr, S.C. (2023). Sexist Wage. In: Wage and Well-being. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19301-9_8

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