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Discrimination Against Single Men
Employers reward married men more than equally qualified single men
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?
An article by Swiss researcher Patrick McDonald, “The male marriage premium,” published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, 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.
The earnings of single and married men and how they change over time
McDonald analyzed data from the Swiss Household Panel, in which workers in Switzerland had been interviewed repeatedly between 1999 and…
