The feminine gender role penalty: gender role expression, compensation, and sector differences in wage outcomes

Equal pay for males and females has been a focus of legislation for decades, yet closing the wage gap remains a persistent challenge. While traditional explanatory factors such as biological sex, education, tenure, and age account for much of the variation in wages, the remaining unexplained portion suggests that additional factors may contribute to pay inequities. One largely unexplored area in the equal pay literature is the relationship between gender role and wages. Drawing on gender role and role congruity theories, this study hypothesizes that individuals with a more feminine, communal gender role will earn lower wages because feminine behavioral expectations are incongruent with the more agentic norms often associated with workplace success. Using a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition analysis and a matched sample of full-time employees from large metropolitan areas in the United States (n=1,114), the study found that feminine gender role was a significant negative predictor of wages. Respondents exhibiting the feminine gender role earned 2.86% lower wages than their counterparts. Since women in the sample were more likely to report feminine gender role characteristics, this effect disproportionately affects female employees. Given the challenge of closing the pay gap and the slower rate of reduction in pay differentials, the inclusion of internalized and social variables may be an important next area of exploration. In an additional exploratory ordinary least squares multi-group analysis, feminine gender role was not a significant predictor of wages among public sector employees, but remained significantly negatively associated with wages among private sector employees. These findings suggest that the more standardized compensation structures common in the public sector may help reduce pay differentials associated with gendered behavioral expectations. Future research should further examine public-sector compensation practices and investigate the potential influence of gendered behavioral scripts in hiring, promotion, and compensation processes.