Put your Money Where your Values Are: Communion, Gender, and the Value of Careers.

The gender pay-gap has been partially attributed to women’s overrepresentation in relatively low-paid healthcare and early education fields (HEED; Croft, Schmader & Block, 2015) vs. high-paid science, technology, engineering, and math fields (STEM). Past work suggests that HEED careers are devalued precisely because their high representation of women (Eagly, 1987; Ridgeway, 1991). Over and above gender distribution, the extent to which HEED and STEM careers afford what we value could also help explain lower pay in HEED vs. STEM fields. The current research tests the hypothesis that higher salaries are assigned to HEED by individuals and cultures that are more communally oriented. We report evidence that communal values, both at an individual (Study1 and 2) and a national level (Study3), relate to higher pay for HEED vs. STEM. In Study1, a sample of 380 Canadian undergraduates reported the ideal salary of seven HEED and seven STEM careers on the basis of the careers’ value to society. Whereas participants generally assigned a lower monetary value to HEED vs. STEM, communal values were related to placing a higher monetary value on HEED careers. Study2 (n=291 Canadians) replicated this pattern and additionally showed that communal values predicted greater support for public policy aimed at increasing the pay of HEED. Using publically available data from 33 countries, Study3 tested our theory at a national level. Controlling for national salary averages and gender-distribution in careers, actual salaries are higher in HEED, and lower in STEM, to the extent that countries are more communally oriented.