Comparable Worth New Directions for Research (1985) / Chapter Skim
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Social Judgment Biases in Comparable Worth Analysis
Social Judgment Biases in Comparable Worth Analysis
Pages 53-70
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From page 53... ...
In particular, considerable research has established that when people are faced with a complex inferential task, such as comparable worth assessment, theirjudgments are vulnerable to a number of biases resulting from unequal attention to the various elements of information provided. Such selective attention can favor information that is most readily recalled, an "availability bias." It can also favor evaluatively consistent information, a "halo bias." And it can favor information that is congruent with existing beliefs, an "expectancy bias." It is important to note that these biases do not necessarily indicate any desire to distort the information provided; rather, it is people's cognitive limitations that produce biased judgments.
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From page 54... ...
Unconstrained by particular rating dimensions, such descriptions are likely to be heavily influenced by biases resulting from unequal attention to various aspects of the information provided. Structured job descriptions, on the other hand, are likely to minimize bias that results from a failure to even think about job elements that are not already salient.
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From page 55... ...
For this reason, although structured job analysis procedures may be useful for describing jobs, evaluating the comparable worth of jobs requires determining which job elements should be compensated, rather than relying on market indicators of which job elements are currently compensated. Given that this is the ultimate goal ofthe job description, it might make more sense to begin by defining the compensable factors and then generating a descriptive instrument that has been specifically designed to describe job elements that are likely to be related to the compensable factors.
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From page 56... ...
In addition to the potential of the availability heuristic to produce this general egocentric bias in job descriptions, it could have more specific effects. For example, secretarial job descriptions provided by supervisors might overestimate the job element of typing because this noisy activity is more perceptually salient than is the quieter activity of composing literate and tactful letters.
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From page 57... ...
It should be noted that the availability bias can affect evaluations of job worth on various compensable factors just as it can affect job descriptions. If an analyst reads an entire job description and then makes ratings of job worth on a number of dimensions, these ratings may be overly influenced by the descriptive elements that are most available in memos.
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From page 58... ...
found that the manipulated percentage of women in a job had no consistent impact on evaluations of the job on three compensable factors: education required, experience required, and job complexity. Similarly, whereas the gender of the incumbent had strong effects on job descriptions and evaluations of worth in the research of McArthur and Obrant (1984)
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From page 59... ...
found that subjects showed as much agreement regarding the status of various job activities as they did regarding the status of various job titles, and the activities elicited individual interest profiles that were just as sex-biased as those elicited by titles. While it thus seems unlikely that job descriptions could ever tee generated by people who are unbiased by knowledge of the job's sex composition, prestige, and salary, it may be possible to conceal such information from those who use the job descriptions to evaluate the worth of the jobs on various compensable factors.
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From page 60... ...
The Expectancy Bias Considerable evidence indicates that people's expectancies can exert an important influence on their social judgments. More specifically, people's judgments about the characteristics of other people tend to be overly influenced by information that confirms what they expect these characteristics to be (see McArthur, 1981, for a review of this literature)
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From page 61... ...
On the positive side, a psychologically healthy woman was described as more tactful and more aware of others' feelings than was a psychologically healthy man. Such sex stereotypes may well create assumptions regarding what abilities or personality traits are needed for women's work as opposed to men's work, and job descriptions provided by incumbents, supervisors, and experts may reflect these culturally shared expectations rather than reflecting the true requirements of a job.
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From page 62... ...
While jobs depicted with male incumbents were perceived as requiring relatively more persuasive ability than those depicted with female incumbents—a finding consistent with the stereotype that men are more dominant than women jobs depicted with male incumbents were not perceived to require more reasoning ability or more mathematical ability, thus providing no evidence for biasing effects of the stereotype that men are more logical and mathematically inclined than women. Although procedural differences argue for the greater ecological validity of McArthur and Obrant's (1984)
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From page 63... ...
While the absence of sex bias in analysts' ratings of the skills required by jobs clearly provides no assurance of unbiased ratings of comparable worth, it does provide some suggestions regarding how to generate job evaluations that are not biased by the incumbent's sex. More specifically, the absence of sex bias in most skill ratings may be due to the fact that people have become sensitized to sexism in judging abilities, with the consequence that analysts deliberately attended to information indicative of skilled work by female incumbents.
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From page 64... ...
Despite the null effect of sex composition in past research, it is also possible that the sex composition of highly segregated occupations could bias job descriptions even when the sex of the incumbents who are viewed is held constant. DEFINING THE COMPENSABLE FACTORS As noted earlier, evaluating the comparable worth of jobs requires determining which job elements should be compensated rather than relying on market indicators of which job elements are currently compensated.
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From page 65... ...
Most notably, there were no significant predictors of the monetary worth of jobs depicted with female incumbents. It should be noted that this study did not directly ask job analysts to indicate what job elements should be compensated.
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From page 66... ...
In a sense these factors represent an expansion of the standard factor of working conditions, and the implication of including them is that jobs may be worth higher wages not only if the physical working conditions are poor but also if the psychological conditions are poor.2 CONCLUSIONS The complexity and inherent subjectivity of job analysis coupled with the limitations of human judgment make it extremely unlikely that the objectively true worth of jobs can ever be established, even if some consensus could be reached regarding what job elements should be compensated. The inevitable biases in job descriptions would not be so problematic for comparable worth analysis if one could assume that they were not sex-linked: if judgmental biases simply added a constant error to evaluations of every job, the true relative standing of men's and women's jobs would be maintained.
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From page 67... ...
For example, if one found that female incumbents underestimate the physical effort required by a particular job in comparison with male incumbents, then some constant factor could be added to female incumbents' estimates of effort required in otherjobs jobs for which there are few male incumbents. However, such a strategy assumes a constant sex bias in job descriptions, and this assumption may well be
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From page 68... ...
Such measures are, of course, limited in scope as well as being more costly and cumbersome to employ than subjective judgments are. While research may provide methods for reducing judgmental biases in comparable worth analysis, it is likely that such biases will never be completely eliminated.
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From page 69... ...
Rudin 1984 Choosing Compensable Factors for Comparable Worth Analysis. Unpublished paper, Department of Psychology, Brandeis University.
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From page 70... ...
Ross 1980 Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
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