The Perpetuation of Gender Inequality Through Costly Gender Congruent Choices

Abstract

Classic theories of gender inequality focus on women’s experiences to understand processes in play (e.g. backlash, glass ceiling). We considered how men’s reluctance to act in ways that may be perceived as feminine could be an unexplored mechanism through which gender inequality is perpetuated. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated the existence of an asymmetry in how men and women approach gender incongruence in self-expressive contexts. Results indicated that though both men and women prefer gender congruency, there exists an asymmetry whereby men care more to avoid gender incongruence. Men's willingness to bear disproportionally greater costs to avoid incongruence was so much that they forwent higher quality choices (e.g. better fitting clothes), whereas women did not disregard quality. In Study 3, we extend the implications of this asymmetry to career decisions. We examined an asymmetry in the magnitude of costs (e.g. higher salary/stability) that men and women are willing to incur to remain gender consistent in the labor market, and again found that men are more reluctant to make gender incongruent choices than women. We further discuss how the function of this asymmetry in perpetuating gender segregation differs from, and can add to, literature on gender inequality.