Behind the Times story are two academic studies with similar conclusions: among men with the same education, length of service and willingness to relocate, the raises and promotions go to those whose wives don’t work. Linda Stroh of Loyola University of Chicago and Frieda Reitman of New York’s Pace University, each of whom coauthored a different study, say that discrimination is the cause. Most companies, they argue, are run by men whose wives don’t work, and those bosses reward managers who fit into the same mold. ““We are still falling into the trap of favoring a traditional manager, a family type who is disappearing,’’ Stroh says. Stroh may well be right – but the two studies hardly offer decisive proof. The questions they don’t answer may be more interesting than the ones they address.
Stroh based her study of pay raises on 348 male managers at 20 Fortune 500 companies. Almost half of her sample worked in two overwhelmingly male fields, chemicals and basic manufacturing. While the daddy differential may be real in heavy industries like these, that doesn’t mean that it exists at smaller companies, in government or in services, where most Americans work.
Both Stroh and Reitman investigate whether the husband’s earnings are affected by the wife’s choice about employment. But suppose the linkage runs the other way – that top earners’ wives stay home more often because their husbands’ higher incomes permit it. ““That is the danger of this kind of study,’’ says Peter McCullagh, a University of Chicago statistician. ““The data doesn’t show causality, and sometimes the researchers get it completely backwards.''
Everyone agrees that a wife at home can be a big asset, doing research, minding the kids and running errands so that hubby can work late. ““To have a spouse that is nonworking is to have two people working on one career,’’ says Prof. Jeffrey Pfeffer of Stanford Business School. But is a dual-career family being victimized or is it consciously weighing the costs and choosing a preferred strategy? Felice Schwartz, the mommy-track author, doubts that companies discriminate. ““They just want single-minded executives,’’ she says (i.e., all family-minded folks suffer alike). What could be more equal?
