DALLAS – The wage gap may not be for women only – but also for managers who work with women.

Research has long found that women overall earn less than men in similar circumstances. A new study suggests that whatever forces underlie that gap might additionally depress pay for male or female managers who supervise, report to or otherwise work with women.

The study, released Sunday, also suggests that the average age of workers reporting to a manager can affect his or her compensation. The further that average is from 40 – younger or older – the less money the manager is likely to get.

“To me it’s very discouraging, the strength of the findings and the consistency across both the women and the age issue,” said researcher Cheri Ostroff.

Working with Leanne Atwater at Arizona State University West, Ostroff studied more than 2,100 managers representing 512 companies from 1991 to 2000. The findings appear in the current Journal of Applied Psychology.

Even when fewer than half the people supervised were female, managers made $1,000 or $2,000 less a year than if they led an all-male group, Ostroff said.

When a majority of people supervised was female, pay dropped steeply.

“Once your group is 90 percent female, you could be paid an average $10,000 less than someone who has all males in their group,” said Ostroff, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia University Teachers College.

Having more female peers or supervisors also depressed a manager’s pay, but not as dramatically.

“Your worst-case scenario is your peers are female, your supervisor is female and most of your subordinates are female,” Ostroff said. “Then you’re really going to get hit” – perhaps for $20,000 a year or more, she said.

Even without accounting for colleagues’ gender, the female managers earned on average 9 percent less than male managers in similar circumstances.

The cause of that gap didn’t appear related to a sex bias in rating performance, the study said, noting that the women got higher performance scores than the men did.

Flat-out discrimination could be one cause, Ostroff said. “Another would be these people are performing well but we’re not giving them jobs that are as valuable.”

Although the study looks at a wide range of jobs, one drawback is that it doesn’t look at jobs that are stereotyped male or female, or young or old, said Jeanette Cleveland, an industrial and organizational psychologist at Penn State University. She’s curious, for instance, whether a woman in a male-dominated field would earn less than a man in a comparable female-dominated field. “I don’t think necessarily we’d find the same kind of results,” she said.

Still, the study could help find hidden hurdles as companies strive to ensure worker diversity, said labor economist Haig Nalbantian.

“You may say you ensure supervisors are sensitive and don’t fall into traps of inadvertently underpaying women,” he said. “But if there are processes in the organization that somehow are channeling women into jobs that are inherently lower-paid, that inherently have less opportunity, or if women are somehow self-selecting into those kinds of jobs, no matter how much sensitivity the managers have, you’re going to end up with disparities.”

Bias might be at work even when women “choose” lesser positions, Cleveland noted.

Better jobs could be structured so it’s harder for women, who usually have greater family burdens than men, to tend to such obligations.

“As a woman, I may “choose’ to go into that lower-paid job because I have no other choices that will fit with other things in my life,” Cleveland said.


A key factor behind stereotypes about what type of person should hold a job is what type of person most frequently occupies it, Cleveland has found. So women with jobs that men usually hold are likely to be perceived negatively, as are older workers in jobs typically held by younger people.

Therefore, if a man is supervising mainly women, or has mostly female colleagues, “people may say, “Gee, I wonder what is going on here about this individual?’ and may rate them a little bit lower,” Cleveland said.

Things don’t work the same in reverse, though. “You’ve heard the notion of a glass ceiling for women,” Cleveland said. “For men there tends to be a notion of a glass escalator.” When men hold jobs usually occupied by women, their supervisors “tend to get them quickly out of the front lines and into management-type positions.”

Companies can ask themselves two questions, said Nalbantian, a partner with Mercer Human Resource Consulting. First, do they have pay or promotion disparities that have no legitimate basis? Second, are those disparities related to individual supervisors’ actions, or are they systematic – meaning women tend to be funneled to, or to select, some jobs, and men others?

“I’m not saying that that’s an easy thing to cure,” he said.

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AP-NY-08-27-03 0622EDT