Married men are paid more than single men. That has been demonstrated so many times, researchers have a name for it: “the male marriage premium.” The question now is why. Do married men deserve to be paid more because they are better workers? Or are employers discriminating against single men? Or is it some of both? Something else?
An article by Swiss researcher Patrick McDonald, published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2020, included two studies. In one of them, pairs of profiles of job applicants were created that were identical in every way except that in one of them, the applicant was described as single and in the other, as married. Employers evaluated just one of the applicants from a pair, and indicated how likely they were to interview the candidate and how much they would pay that candidate if they did hire him. The other study was an analysis of the actual pay of men of different marital statuses and how that changed over time.
Because there is quite a lot to say about each study, I’ll start with a summary:
A recent report once again demonstrates the unfair advantages married men have over single men in the workplace. Single men have a harder time getting their foot in the door. Even when their backgrounds and credentials are identical to married men’s, employers are more likely to invite the married men to interview. Asked to say what they’d pay the men if they did hire them, they indicated they would pay the married men more. Analyses of the earnings of more than 700 men who were surveyed an average of six different times also showed that married men are paid more than single men.
THE EXPERIMENT
What If Everything about the Men Is Identical, Except for their Marital Status?
If two applicants were exactly the same in every way, except that one was married and the other had always been single, and the employer paid the married man more, that could not be explained or excused by saying that the married man was a better worker. Instead, that would be outright discrimination.
McDonald created pairs of profiles that described men identical in their work experience. The profiles (similar to job applications) also included other information such as the applicant’s age, gender, nationality, number of children, and education. That information was identical in each pair of profiles, too. The only thing that differed was whether the applicant was described as a single man or a married man.
Each employer saw only one profile from each pair. They indicated for each how likely they were to invite the man for a job interview and how much they would pay him if they did hire him. The applications were for three different kinds of jobs representing three different levels of prestige.
The people who evaluated the candidates were employers, recruiters, and human resource managers who were members of a large association of human resource professionals in Switzerland. The 513 people who agreed to participate were disproportionately from large organizations and big cities. Other research shows that larger organizations with more professional human resource services discriminate less on personal characteristics. Therefore, McDonald suggests, the results of this study may underestimate just how much employers favor married men.
For all three kinds of jobs, the employers were more likely to invite the married men for an interview than the single men, even though their credentials and everything else about the men was identical. The employers also offered higher salaries to the married men than to the single men, though for the medium-prestige job, the difference wasn’t statistically significant.
ANALYSES OF THE EARNINGS OF SINGLE MEN AND MARRIED MEN
Data for the other study came from the Swiss Household Panel, in which workers in Switzerland have been interviewed repeatedly between 1999 and 2017. McDonald focused on men between the ages of 25 and 50, all of whom were unmarried when they were first interviewed. In this longitudinal study, 707 men were interviewed an average of 6 different times.
At Any One Point in Time, How Much More Are Married Men Getting Paid Than Single Men?
At any one point in time, some of the men in the study were single and others were married. (Divorced men were not included.) How much more were the married men getting paid? McDonald did the analyses in different ways, and the marriage premium ranged from 7% to 11%. The lowest estimate, 7%, resulted from analyses in which the single and married men were matched on their education, age cohort, health, nationality, and social class (as measured by the prestige of their father’s job) at the start of the study.
Even using the lowest estimate, McDonald calculates that every year, married men were being paid the equivalent of about 1.5 months more in wages than the single men. If that advantage did not get even greater over time, that would mean that over the course of 8 years, the married men got paid a whole year’s extra salary.
How Much More Do Men Get Paid If They Get Married, Compared to When They Were Single?
In longitudinal research, that follows the same people over time, you are not stuck just comparing married and single men at one point in time. You can also see if the men in the study who got married were paid more than the men who stayed single the whole time. Of course, they were.
McDonald did different analyses, and the pay advantage of the men who got married ranged from 2.6% to 3.5% more, compared to those who stayed single. He said that the increase in pay could “broadly be interpreted as a productivity effect, if no employer preferences toward married men were present and men on steeper wage trajectories did not select into marriage.”
Here’s my translation. He is suggesting that the married men could have been paid more because they became more productive. He can only say that if the employers did not instead just “prefer” married men. But the other study, the experiment, strongly suggests that employers do “prefer” married men.
I think the language of preference is putting a pretty face on what’s really going on. Preference is if you like strawberry ice cream better than chocolate chip. If the men who married did not become more productive, but their employers still paid them more than the men who stayed single, that’s discrimination.
The study did include factors that were considered measures of productivity: management status, job prestige, participation in professional training, and hours of work. However, none of these can be assumed to be pure measures of productivity, because employers can be biased in favor of married men for every one of them. They can promote married men into management, or into more prestigious jobs, or into more training programs, or give them more hours, even if they are no more deserving than the single men.
Also, so far as I can tell, McDonald never reported whether the men who got married really did become more productive in any of those ways, compared to when they were single. All we know for sure is that they got paid more than the men who stayed single.
Are Married Men Paid More Because the Kinds of Men Who Marry Are Also the Kinds of Men Who Are Better Workers?
Remember that when the married men were compared to the single men at any one point in time, the married men were getting paid at least 7% more. But when the men’s pay was tracked over time, the men who got married were paid, at most, only about 3.5% more than the men who stayed single. I think that 3.5% advantage is mostly due to employers’ discrimination against single men, but even if it is instead due to married men’s greater productivity (or something else), it still doesn’t explain the entire 7% or more extra that married men are paid.
McDonald thinks the main reason that married men are paid more is that the kinds of men who marry are also the kinds of men who are better workers. For example, they are more highly educated and they have better health. That’s called “selection.” Supposedly, more productive men are selected into marriage.
In this study, the men who stayed single did have a half-year less education, on the average, than the men who got married. They were also slightly older, 38.7 vs. 37.0. But their health was nearly identical, as was their social class. The married men were more likely to be Swiss (instead of some other nationality) than the single men, 91% vs. 88%. Overall, I don’t think that adds up to a compelling argument that the men who married were superior, as potential workers and husbands, than the men who stayed single. But maybe I’m missing something.
Does the Pay Advantage of Married Men Get Even Bigger Over Time?
In some of the analyses, McDonald tried to match the single and married men on their education, age cohort, health, nationality, and social class, so those factors could not account for any differences in pay. But if you want to know if those factors matter, then you don’t want to match the men, but keep those differences I just described. The married men, for example, had a half-year more education and they were more likely to be Swiss. (If nationality mattered, that strikes me as more likely a matter of employer prejudice than employee productivity, but the various factors were not analyzed separately.)
In these new analyses, McDonald estimates that at the beginning of their careers, at age 25, the married men were already getting paid 20% more than the single men. Over the course of their careers, between the ages of 25 and 50, “the married man can expect average wage increases of over 3% per year, while the unmarried man’s increases are in the order of slightly over 2%.” In other words, the married men get paid more to begin with (they start out richer) and then their advantage continues to grow over time (the rich get richer).
McDonald wants to conclude that the married men were paid more primarily because they were “on a higher wage track” and “a faster growing wage trajectory.” Again, he is saying that “the selection of more productive men into marriage” is the most important reason why married men get paid more.
In the other study, though, the single and married men were identical in their productivity and in every other way. But the employers still unfairly favored the married men by inviting them to more job interviews and paying them more.
What Needs to Change?
In the beginning of the article, a number of reasons were offered for why employers seem to “prefer” married men. Maybe, McDonald suggests, employers feel more “affinity” for married workers, because employers and other people of power in the workplace are more likely to be married themselves. Or maybe they think they should offer married men a “family wage.” Or they think married men will be more reliable or more productive (even if they are not).
It is not until the last paragraph of the article that these singlist practices are labeled appropriately, as “discrimination, bias, or favoritism on the part of employers.” The effect, McDonald acknowledges, “is non-negligible” and “should not be brushed aside as irrelevant.”
In many European countries, McDonald notes, it is commonplace (though not required) for applicants to include their marital status on their CVs. That should stop. If employers don’t know who is or is not married at that point in the process, then they cannot discriminate against the single men just for being single.
[Notes: (1) The opinions expressed here do not represent the official positions of Unmarried Equality. (2) I’ll post all these blog posts at the UE Facebook page; please join our discussions there. (3) For links to previous columns, click here.]
About Bella DePaulo
