Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, puts another nail in the coffin of the feminist delusion of the gender wage-gap myth based purely on sexism:
Men continue to earn significantly more than women. Does the gender pay gap imply that women are less productive than men? Or do men reap rewards for characteristics that don’t actually increase their productive contribution?…
That deployment may be shaped by the behavior that our economic institutions tend to reward.
Social scientists have long observed that a “Machiavellian personality” tends to enhance economic success…
Men score significantly higher than women on Machiavellianism and aggressiveness, which may help explain why 15 times as many men as women were in prison in 2008.
These traits also have significant consequences in the labor market. Research suggests that women are less Machiavellian, more agreeable and more altruistic than men, with negative consequences for their earnings.
These personality traits may impair women’s success in bargaining for higher pay. It’s hard to believe that they lower women’s overall contribution to society.
As I wrote in prior posts here and here, women do not generally earn less than men solely because of their sex; women make less because the behaviors that women tend to exhibit directly lead to lower salaries.
The reasoning is not that complex. Men love fighting and competition (which leads to insecurity) while women love agreement and consensus (which lead to security). Men are driven by evolutionary impulses to become as great of a resource-provider as possible, and this means negotiating better salaries at interviews and changing jobs whenever a better offer comes along. Women are naturally more insecure and therefore avoid conflict and change, meaning that they are less prone to haggling over a salary when it may threaten the job offer. Moreover, women may hesitate to leave a position for a higher salary because they are social creatures (more so than men), and they might not want to leave friends and comfort behind for something entirely new.