A new study (via Kevin Drum) controls for most of the typical factors suspected in causing the gap between men and women in wages and finds that the gap is actually between men who hold traditional views of gender roles and everyone else.
Now, I had always felt that sexism did not seem likely to be the main reason for the continuation of the gender gap. Ledbetter v Goodyear aside, I just don’t get the sense that there are a lot of guys intentionally out to pay other men more and women less. This study does not seem to control for years in the workforce, which I would tend to expect would lessen the gap a little more. There may be a remaining, slight male-female difference, but clearly, this is not as simple as a gap between sexes as a gap between views of gender roles.
As it turns out, men who approach the world with a fairly gender-neutral approach, especially, one would guess, more feminine men, are victims of the wage gap alongside women. Unfortunately, it would seem that traditional men are most likely to succeed, putting them in the position to advantage other traditional men, leaving the rest of us on the outside looking in, making the gap harder to bridge. This would seem to strengthen my argument that we need to shift from the current feminist focus specifically on the role of women to a broader concern about gender. I worry that if we focus too much on the gap between men and women rather than traditional men and everyone else, we will boost women and leave egalitarian men behind because we are not addressing the true source of the problem, just as poor white men can be left behind by Affirmative Action because the diagnosis of the problem is racism or sexism rather than class-bias.
