Married Men Paid More Than Single Men, Get More Interviews

Married men are paid more than single men. That has been demonstrated so many times, researchers have a name for it: “the male marriage premium.” The question now is why. Do married men deserve to be paid more because they are better workers? Or are employers discriminating against single men? Or is it some of both? Or something else?

An article by Swiss researcher Patrick McDonald, “The male marriage premium,” published in the Journal of Marriage and Family in 2020, included two studies. In one of them, pairs of profiles of job applicants were created that were identical in every way except that in one of them, the applicant was described as single and in the other, as married. Employers evaluated just one of the applicants from a pair and indicated how likely they were to interview the candidate and how much they would pay that candidate if they did hire him. The other study was an analysis of the actual pay of men of different marital statuses and how that changed over time.

The Earnings of Single and Married Men and How They Change Over Time

McDonald analyzed data from the Swiss Household Panel, in which workers in Switzerland have been interviewed repeatedly between 1999 and 2017. He focused on men between the ages of 25 and 50, all of whom were unmarried when they were first interviewed. In this longitudinal study, 707 men were interviewed an average of 6 different times.

The data were analyzed in many different ways. Each time, results showed that married men were paid more than single men. Married men might differ from single men in many ways. For example, if they are more highly educated, then employers might pay them more not because they are married, but because they have more education. That’s why one particular analysis is especially telling. What happens to men’s pay when some men get married and others stay single? Credentials such as their education are not changing, but is their pay?

McDonald found that pay did change. The pay advantage of the men who got married ranged from 2.6% to 3.5% more, compared to those who stayed single. He said that the increase in pay could “broadly be interpreted as a productivity effect if no employer preferences toward married men were present and men on steeper wage trajectories did not select into marriage.”

Here's what that means. One explanation of why the men who married got paid more is because they became more productive. But that can’t be the explanation, or not the only one, if the employers “preferred” married men. The results of the other study, which I will describe next, strongly suggest that employers do “prefer” married men.

I think the language of preference is putting a pretty face on what’s really going on. Preference is if you like strawberry ice cream better than chocolate chip. If the men who married did not become more productive, but their employers still paid them more than the men who stayed single, that’s discrimination.

The study did include factors that were considered measures of productivity: management status, job prestige, participation in professional training, and hours of work. However, none of these can be assumed to be pure measures of productivity, because employers can be biased in favor of married men for every one of them. They can promote married men into management, or into more prestigious jobs, or into more training programs, or give them more hours, even if they are no more deserving than the single men.

Also, so far as I can tell, McDonald never reported whether the men who got married really did become more productive in any of those ways, compared to when they were single. All we know for sure is that they got paid more than the men who stayed single.

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If two applicants were exactly the same in every way, except that one was married and the other had always been single, and the employer paid the married man more, that could not be explained or excused by saying that the married man was a better worker. That’s outright discrimination.

McDonald created pairs of profiles that described men identical in their work experience. The profiles (similar to job applications) also included other information such as the applicant’s age, gender, nationality, number of children, and education. That information was identical in each pair of profiles, too. The only thing that differed was whether the applicant was described as a single man or a married man.

Each employer saw only one profile from each pair. They indicated for each how likely they were to invite the man for a job interview and how much they would pay him if they did hire him. The applications were for three different kinds of jobs representing three different levels of prestige.

The people who evaluated the candidates were employers, recruiters, and human resource managers who were members of a large association of human resource professionals in Switzerland. The 513 people who agreed to participate were disproportionately from large organizations and big cities. Other research shows that larger organizations with more professional human resource services discriminate less on personal characteristics. Therefore, McDonald suggests, the results of this study may underestimate just how much employers favor married men.

For all three kinds of jobs, the employers were more likely to invite the married men for an interview than the single men, even though their credentials and everything else about the men were identical. The employers also offered higher salaries to the married men than to the single men, though for the medium-prestige job, the difference wasn’t statistically significant.

What Needs to Change?

At the beginning of the article, a number of explanations were offered for why employers might show “preferences” for married men. Maybe, McDonald suggests, employers feel more “affinity” for married workers because employers and other people of power in the workplace are more likely to be married themselves. Or maybe they think they should offer married men a “family wage.” Or they think married men will be more reliable or more productive (even if they are not).

In the last paragraph of the article, those unfair practices, which are examples of singlism, are labeled appropriately as “discrimination, bias, or favoritism on the part of employers.” The effect, McDonald says, “is non-negligible” and “should not be brushed aside as irrelevant.”

In many European countries, McDonald notes, it is commonplace (though not required) for applicants to include their marital status on their CVs. That should stop. If employers don’t know who is or is not married at that point in the process, then they cannot discriminate against single men just for being single.