New research published in the Academy of Management Journal purports to show that religion perpetuates the gender wage gap. This article claims that men tend to earn significantly more than women in societies with “heightened religiosity.” This worldwide survey found that nations where more than 95% of the people said religion was important in their daily lives, had a situation where women earned around 46% as much as men. Additionally, countries where fewer than 20% of people said religion was important averaged earning around 75% of men’s wages. Based on the research findings, this held true for all major world religions throughout the world.
Now taken at face value, the message of this research is that religion is bad and secularism is good. While the authors didn’t quite put it in those terms, the message is quite clear.
But In order to understand what is really going on here, we need to explore something that goes well beyond the specific data that these researchers compiled. It is also important to grasp that this “something” that we need to explore is not limited to matters related to gender. There are other factors involved in this phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by analyzing wages based on gender – factors that the researchers not only did not take into account, but that their very foundational worldview beliefs don’t even acknowledge.
One of the major unstated assumptions of this research is that the level of a person’s wages determines their worth to society.
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