Study: Less Pay for Men Who Support Equal Pay

This is a rush transcript from "America's Election HQ," September 22, 2008. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

MARTHA MACCALLUM, HOST: Listen up, ladies: Macho men may be making significantly more money than those who talk up in support of equal pay for men and women, if you can believe it. A new study finds that the men who earn the most happen to be the same men who think that women should stay at home. That's interesting.

Joining me now is the co-author of the gender study, organizational psychologist, Beth Livingston.

So Beth, what is this all about?

BETH LIVINGSTON, CO-AUTHOR OF THE GENDER STUDY: Well, what we have found — we did a longitudinal study and found that men who have gender role attitudes that are more traditional, so in general, they're more likely to think of women having more of their place at the home and men should be the primary breadwinner. They tend to be more likely to make money than men who have more equal attitudes towards women, sometimes to the tune of about $12,000 a year.

MACCALLUM: Really?

LIVINGSTON: Yes.

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MACCALLUM: So these poor guys who are sticking up for equal pay for their female co-workers — what are they making?

LIVINGSTON: Well, on average, we saw a difference of about $14,000 a year between traditional men and traditional women. And we saw a difference of about $12,000 a year between traditional men and less- traditional men.

MACCALLUM: And how — tell me about the study, how large the study was, and you know, what was the population like.

LIVINGSTON: Well, what we did was we used the Bureau of Labor Statistics data site, that they have conducted data over a period of about 25 years since 1979 and covered about 12,000 people. And we used their data that they provided on how much they make every year and how — what their gender role attitudes are. And we used four different time periods. So, four different data collection points to do our analysis.

MACCALLUM: And what questions were they asked to determine whether or not they, you know, were sort of gender traditional, you say?

LIVINGSTON: Well, there was a number of questions, but the types of questions were things like, "Do you believe a woman's place should be in the home? Do you believe that the male should be predominantly responsible for the work (UNINTELLIGIBLE).

MACCALLUM: And (UNINTELLIGIBLE) you said, "Heck, yes." They're all making a lot of money because they're all sticking together and raising each other's salaries.

LIVINGSTON: We're not exactly sure what's causing all that, but we definitely have an effect.

MACCALLUM: All right. That's very interesting. So is there any suggestion that, you know, anything to be done to change this attitude?

LIVINGSTON: Well, we're not exactly sure. What good news we do have from our study is that over time, we found since the beginning in 1979, that gender role attitudes are becoming less traditional, so —

MACCALLUM: Well, that is good news. Thank you very much.

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