How Personality Traits Can Influence Salary

CAMBRIDGE, United Kingdom — Why do women earn even less than men in 2024? Despite decades of progress toward equality in the workplace, a stubborn gender pay gap persists, with women earning approximately 25% less than their male counterparts. Although factors such as education and work experience partly explain this disparity, a substantial portion has remained mysteriously unexplained – until now. A new study suggests that personality differences between men and women may play a much larger role in pay inequality than previously thought.

The research, led by University of Cambridge economists Christopher Flinn, Petra Todd and Weilong Zhang, takes a novel approach to understanding how personality traits influence success in the workplace. Rather than just looking at raw salary differences, they looked at how the “big five” personality traits – openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness and emotional stability – affect everything from salary negotiations to job-seeking behavior. ‘job.

The Big Five personality framework has become the gold standard in psychology for measuring fundamental aspects of human personality. Openness reflects curiosity and creativity; conscience encompasses organization and work ethic; extroversion measures sociability; agreeableness reflects cooperation and compassion; and emotional stability (the opposite of neuroticism) indicates resilience and calmness under pressure.

Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, which surveyed nearly 11,000 households and more than 20,000 individuals between 2013 and 2019, the researchers analyzed a final sample of 6,683 workers aged 25 to 60. They found striking differences in how men and women scored on these characteristics. Women tend to score higher on agreeableness and lower on emotional stability – and these particular trait differences appear to put them at a significant disadvantage in the workplace, particularly when it comes to negotiating deals. higher salaries.

The study found that more agreeable people – those who are cooperative, friendly and eager to please others – tend to have lower salaries and take longer to find a new job when unemployed.

“Here’s the thing: Women generally perform better in areas like agreeableness, which is often associated with social harmony. Yet this characteristic can lead to lower wages due to reduced bargaining power,” says Zhang in a commentary on The Conversation. “(A)usability, despite its social benefits, turns out to be a financial liability. Highly agreeable people tend to avoid conflict, which can make them less assertive in negotiations.

At the same time, emotional stability has emerged as a crucial trait for success at work, associated with higher wages and more stable employment. The fact that women score differently than men on these specific characteristics explains nearly 20% of the gender pay gap, according to the researchers’ analysis.

“The female candidate scores higher on agreeableness and slightly lower on emotional stability. Despite their qualifications, the male candidate may be perceived as a better candidate for the position due to implicit biases about what makes a ‘good leader,’” Zhang writes. “As a result, the male candidate may receive a higher salary offer, even if his job performance ends up being equivalent.”

The research found that conscientiousness – being organized, responsible and hardworking – leads to better outcomes for both men and women, increasing wages by 6.8% for men and 5.3% for women. In fact, women score slightly higher on this trait on average, helping to narrow the wage gap somewhat, but not enough to overcome disadvantages related to other trait differences.

Before jumping to conclusions about innate gender differences, it is important to note that personality traits are shaped by both nature and nurture. Girls are often socialized from a young age to be more agreeable and accommodating, while boys are usually encouraged to be more assertive. These learned behaviors can become ingrained personality traits that persist into adulthood and the workplace.

The good news is that personality traits are not completely set in stone. Researchers point to evidence from clinical psychology studies showing that personality traits can be changed through therapeutic treatments. Their analysis suggests that providing mental health interventions to people with low emotional stability could reduce the gender wage gap by 2 to 6 percent.

The study also found that education and cognitive abilities, while important for career success, explain surprisingly little of the gender wage gap when personality traits are taken into account. In fact, gender differences in education levels and cognitive skills tend to reduce the wage gap rather than contribute to it. This suggests that traditional approaches focused solely on equalizing education and training opportunities may prove insufficient to achieve pay parity.

Of course, addressing personality-based pay disparities raises complex questions about individual and institutional change. The researchers emphasize that their goal is not to suggest women change their personalities, but rather to shed light on how certain personality traits affect labor market outcomes.

Their findings, published in The Journal of Political Economycould help develop more effective policies to achieve equality in the workplace. Rather than focusing exclusively on discrimination or skill differences, interventions could also target the subtle ways in which personality influences career trajectories and compensation.

“Our results lead to a critical conclusion: personality matters,” writes Zhang. “But this must not perpetuate inequalities. Qualities such as agreeableness and emotional stability are neither good nor bad in themselves, but their value in the workplace is often shaped by societal norms and organizational cultures. By tackling these biases, we can move towards a fairer labor market.