Pre-career Perceptions of Gendered Work Performance: The Impact of Same-Gender Referents and Work Experience on Men's Evaluation Bias

According to the United States Census Bureau, women's 2016 earnings equated to approximately 80% of men's annual median income (Semega et al. in U.S. Census Bureau, current population reports. Income and poverty in the United States: 2016. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC, 2017). This pay gap, while decreasing marginally over time, has remained fairly consistent. Social science research has not sufficiently explained the gap. Research has tended to focus on the existence of the gap or on women's lower expectations. Women's use of same-gender referents has been found to both result in perceptions of wages as more just (Mueller and Wallace in Soc Psychol Q 59:338-349, 1996; Valet in Work Occup 1-26, 2018) as well as in higher job satisfaction (Buchanan in Sociol Focus 41:177-196, 2008. 10.1080/00380237.2008.10571329). This gender paradox of the contented female worker (Crosby in Relative deprivation and working women, Oxford University Press, New York, 1982) is important as it potentially hinders the demand for equal pay and perpetuates the gender gap. Gender biases in work performance evaluations are critical to our understanding of women's lower pay. This article examines both men and women's use of same-gender referents and the impact on perceptions potentially biasing the evaluations of women's work. Using a survey of 488 undergraduate university students from the mid-southern United States, we first compare the salary expectations and work aspirations of women and men and find no gender differences. Next, we investigate how same-gender referent use, particularly for men, impacts work performance assessments using the perceptions of gendered work performance scale. We find men perceive women as inferior performers, with this tendency being stronger for men who use same-gender referents, as well as, for men lacking work experience, while same-gender referent use by women is not associated with gendered performance perceptions.