Sex Differences in Work Preferences, Life Values, and Personal Views

...and how they shape men and women's lives

What determines men and women’s life outcomes - the professions they go into, the goals they set themselves, the time they devote to career versus family? The short answer, of course, is “Lots of things.” But according to a recent paper by David Lubinski and colleagues, among the most important contributors are people’s work preferences, life values, and personal views. And because these things aren’t evenly distributed across the sexes, they may help to explain certain sex differences in people’s life outcomes.

Women’s place in the world has radically transformed over the last half-century. In some ways, in fact, women in the West are now doing better than men. Among other things, more women than men are graduating from high school, more women are going to university, and more women are getting PhDs.

At the same time, however, women are still underrepresented in certain fields, including, most famously, inorganic STEM fields such as computer science, engineering, and physics. (STEM, as I’m sure you know, stands for science, technology, engineering, and math.) On top of that, women are underrepresented at the highest levels of most fields - including those in which women outnumber men overall. What explains these stubborn gender gaps?

Three commonly cited contributors are: (1) bias and barriers; (2) sex differences in career-relevant interests (e.g., the fact that more men than women are interested in working with things, whereas more women than men are interested in working with people); and (3) sex differences in cognitive profiles (the fact, for instance, that more men than women exhibit math tilt [math > verbal, which predicts going into inorganic STEM fields], whereas more women than men exhibit verbal tilt [verbal > math, which predicts going into non-STEM fields]).

Less often discussed is the role of sex differences in work preferences, life values, and personal views. These are the differences that Lubinski, Camilla Benbow, Kira McCabe, and Brian Bernstein, decided to explore in their new paper “Composing Meaningful Lives: Exceptional Women and Men at Age 50,” published in the journal Gifted Child Quarterly.

The two lead authors, Lubinski and Benbow, are most famous for their research tracking a group of individuals identified as mathematically gifted as children. In this paper, they and their collaborators focused the microscope on two subsamples from within that broader group. The first was individuals who did STEM PhDs at top-ranked universities. The second was individuals who were identified at age 12 as not merely gifted or highly gifted, but as profoundly gifted - that is, in the top .01% of ability. In both cases, these are people who, more than almost anyone else in the world, have the power to create the lives and careers they most want. As such, exploring sex differences in their work preferences, life values, and personal views is likely to be particularly instructive.

Enough preamble; let’s get to the results!

Sex Differences in Work Preferences

The main results are captured in the following three figures. The first shows sex differences in work preferences in the two main samples, along with two benchmark samples from Lubinski and Benbow’s earlier research: the gifted (top 1%) and the highly gifted (top 0.5%).

Scores less than 0 indicate that, on average, the item was endorsed more strongly by men than women; scores above 0 indicate that the item was endorsed more strongly by women than men. Items in bold were statistically significant for both the two main samples: the top STEM doctoral students and the profoundly gifted.

As you can see, men on average put more value on taking risks in their jobs, working with things, having a merit-based pay system, and earning a high salary. Women, in contrast, put more value than men on job flexibility, being able to work from home, and working no more than 40 hours a week.

Sex Differences in Life Values

The next figure shows sex differences in life values. Again, scores lower than 0 indicate that men value the item more than women, whereas scores above 0 indicate that women value it more than men.