Recently, The New York Times reported that two separate studies had shown that, on average, men whose wives stayed home and didn't work received more pay raises and substantially higher salaries than men whose wives did work.
The first study, of 348 men at 20 Fortune 500 companies, found that over a five-year period, single-earner husbands received 20 percent higher pay raises than men with working wives. A second study, of 231 men who received MBAs at a prestigious but unnamed university in the 1970s, found that men whose wives didn't work earned 25 percent more than those whose wives did.
The authors of the two studies, Linda Stroh of Loyola University and Frieda Reitman of Pace University, respectively, were quick to attribute the results to sexism and discrimination by senior executives against men who allowed their wives to work.
Stroh called the trend a "definite daddy penalty ... on dads in dual career families." Reitman was slightly more cautious, saying "I don't know if you call it prejudice," before proceeding to call it just that: "but I do think the people in the top positions, who are mostly traditional men, are more comfortable with people who seem like themselves."
However, almost as soon as the studies were presented at the annual meeting of the Academy of Management, skeptics raised questions about the validity of these conclusions. After all, accusing some of America's largest companies of practicing a pattern of institutionalized discrimination, either deliberately or subconsciously, against two-career families is a serious allegation, not to be done lightly.
The fact that the authors felt comfortable making those conclusions without any substantial evidence -- of not only a statistical correlation, but also a direct causal relationship -- is disturbing. For, as critics in the Times, Newsweek and other publications have pointed out, such a pattern could easily result from many factors other than corporate discrimination.
For example, the fact that men with higher salaries are less likely to have working wives could just as well be interpreted backwards -- maybe the richer men's wives don't work because their husbands make enough money to support the family without a second income.
Jumping to the conclusion that Reitman and Stroh did is absurd and unwarranted. Not only is it the reverse of what would intuitively make sense, but there is absolutely no evidence to support it.
For example, if you noticed that the rich tend to be better dressed than the poor, would you conclude that there is some kind of subtle discrimination based on appearance that causes better-dressed workers to advance in their careers faster and earn more money? Of course not, and especially not if you had no evidence, since there is another highly plausible explanation. But that is essentially what the authors of these studies have done.
And there are other equally plausible explanations for the differences in income. As the Times article pointed out, many men whose wives stay at home with the kids feel more comfortable putting in long hours than do husbands whose wives work and aren't always able to take care of the kids. Those extra late nights at the office undoubtedly help when it comes time to hand out pay raises and promotions.
And, as one investment banker told the Times, men who are depended on as the sole source of income may simply feel more pressure to work harder and earn more raises and promotions. Any or all of these factors could easily skew the results of studies like these; in such a situation, a scrupulous researcher would not jump to any quick conclusions.
Until there is evidence that these very plausible factors are not responsible, and that discrimination is the cause of the income discrepancy, the researchers' conclusions are not justified. Unfortunately, lacking definitive proof of those other factors, they ignored them and decided prematurely to blame the pattern wholly on corporate prejudice.
The problem of workplace discrimination is real and continues to hurt those who are its victims. However, poorly planned, agenda-serving studies with wild, unsupported claims such as these only serve to discredit the real and genuine problems that exist. Rather than help, they only polarize public opinion and make progress less likely.
