Matt Yglesias

21 Responses to “The Wages of Traditionalism”

1. Marriage-watcher Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 12:53 pm

   You should put in a link to the original study, so we can look at the date.

   My hunch is that this comes back to the marriage premium for men. Married men earn more than single men, and get bigger rasies each year. Divorced men don’t have this benefit. Nor to widowers. Also, studies using confidential employee-evaluations show that married men recieve better perfomance evaluations.

   The current thinking is that married men earn more becuase they are more productive becuase their wives are specializing in “home-production”, allowing them to specialize on their careers.

   The corollary of that would be non-traditional men, with different views on gender roles, would not benefit fromt he marriage premium (as much?) becuase they are contributing more to home production and are less able to specialize on paid-work.

   That’s the theory, at least.

2. Tyro Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm

   If you internalize the idea that you’re going to be the sole breadwinner and solely responsible for the economic well-being of your household, this is going to be huge fire lit under you to make as much money as humanly possible and exploit any opportunities you can to do so. That seems pretty rational to me.

   Of course, since women with traditional attitudes made the least amount of money, it stands to reason that a partnership between two egalitarians has the benefit of being both the most emotionally stable and the most economically rewarding, compared to the other models.

3. mpowell Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 1:07 pm

   This just tells me that how you handle yourself at work in your interactions with others and in your negotiations with your pay masters, makes a big difference in how much money you make. No real surprise there. There are some weird things going on there. It’s easier, I know, to ask for more pay without sounding like a greedy SOB if you have some explanation of why you need the money. Family with kids is a great explanation. It’s stupid that it works that way, but it does.

4. alli Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 1:11 pm

   There is probably a selection bias (in terms of career paths) at work here, also.

5. Larry Geater Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 1:37 pm

   My bet would be that high wages allow men to afford to have a subserviant wife and feel that women should be subserviant and men with lower wadges are forced to accept women as equals or even bosses. That is why we have the phenomenon of trophy wives.

6. Loneoak Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 1:48 pm

   Maybe now we can drop the pretense that misogyny cum ‘tradition’ is about proper gender roles and accept the fact that it is about power and money.

7. Scott Ferguson Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 1:53 pm

   Larry makes a good point a la correlation vs cause. If traditional men have as traditional a view of work relationships as they do toward domestic ones they might be more assertive about their right to leadership and raise to the top of organizations.

   Personally I suspect that these kinds of studies, millions of them, have poisoned the social sciences. It is like the medical study that found that heavy coffee drinkers had higher incidences of cancer without asking if these kind of people tended to smoke – very difficult to design.

8. retief Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 1:54 pm

   That’s a lovely corelation. But I’m thinking your causation goes the other way. Something along the lines of Richard IV’s speech on the occasion of the his coronation: “In life each man gets what he deserves.”

9. Deborah Says:
   September 22nd, 2008 at 2:29 pm

   Hmm. My husband holds modern views on gender roles, but we work along traditional gender lines–he has the long hours, high pay, good benefits, and I have a flexible part-time job that lets me be home running the household. (Like so many people, discovering that our vague 22-year old “we’ll both work 3/4 time jobs, with good part-time daycare” bore no relationship to actual work requirements and opportunities–increased efficiency through specialization isn’t just for factory jobs.) If I worked 40 hours a week away from the house, he couldn’t work the way he does. It’d be interesting to take apart the questions–I think a lot of people in my particular town who have this setup (Mom home or flexible, home-based job) don’t have old-fashioned ideas about gender roles, but you’d need very neutral questions, not about your specific circumstances, to tease it out.

   “Working the same number of hours” is an interesting caveat; I’d have guessed that was where the breakdown fell.

10. Anthony Damiani Says:
    September 22nd, 2008 at 3:40 pm

    So… people privileged by the system as exists tend, disproportionately, to support the values that construct it?

    I’m shocked.

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