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Relative Deprivation and the Gender Wage Gap
Author(s) -
Jackson Linda A.
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
journal of social issues
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.618
H-Index - 122
eISSN - 1540-4560
pISSN - 0022-4537
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-4560.1989.tb02363.x
Subject(s) - contentment , value (mathematics) , referent , wage , psychology , meaning (existential) , social psychology , gender pay gap , labour economics , economics , linguistics , philosophy , machine learning , computer science , psychotherapist
Research on gender and pay satisfaction indicates that women are equally satisfied with less pay than men receive—the paradox of the contented working woman. Relative deprivation theory provides a framework for understanding how women's paradoxical contentment may contribute to the gender wage gap: Women may be content because they do not perceive a discrepancy between the pay they “want” and the pay they receive. A review of research on gender and the value of pay, and on gender and pay expectations, indicates that a value‐based explanation is needed to account for women's paradoxical contentment with their low pay. Research is described testing the hypothesis that gender differences in the meaning of money influence the value of pay and pay satisfaction, and a preliminary model of pay satisfaction is offered that integrates value‐based and comparative‐referent explanations of the paradoxically contented woman worker. Implications of gender differences in the value of pay for the issue of comparable worth are discussed.