Changing Gender Status Beliefs?  Implications for Gender Inequality in the Labor Market

We draw on research on status processes and cultural change to develop predictions about gender status beliefs in the United States. We expect that

• while explicitly men and women may not distinguish competency and worth by gender, they do so implicitly,
• that younger respondents, especially women, hold less consensual gender status beliefs, and
• men are less likely to alter their gender status beliefs due to loss aversion.

We conduct two studies to assess these arguments. The first uses novel nationally-representative data to describe the distributions of status beliefs in the US population; the second demonstrates the importance of these beliefs for allocating rewards by gender. Combined, the studies demonstrate the distribution of gender status beliefs by age and gender, and the implications for gender inequality, thereby illustrating the role of cultural status beliefs for maintaining gender stratification and the potential role of cohort change for changing such beliefs. Finally, we discuss promising approaches to reduce the impact of gender status beliefs in labor market processes.

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