Study Your bosss politics may be hurting your pay

Study Your bosss politics may be hurting your payStudy Your bosss politics may be hurting your payWho did your boss vote for in the last election? It just may be affecting your paycheck, according to new research.Anew studyinthe Academy of Management Journal finds thata supervisors political ideology has a direct effect on the gap between earnings by women and men within a company.To test this link, Pennsylvania State University researchers looked at six years of internal billings records from a large U.S. law firm, taking performance-based bonuses and cross-referencing them with publicly available political-donation records.Women can lose more than $15,000 in earningsWhat they found confirms that a bosss political leaning do guide decision-making. The more that a supervisor donated to Democratic or Republican campaigns, the more they would be considered a liberal or a conservative for the purposes of the study.Senior associates working for liberal mann an ihrer seites experienced no significant gender gap in pay.But female senior associates with conservative bosses were a different story. The gap in pay between women and men for workers with conservative supervisors increased to $15,468.Whats more, the gender of the bosses didnt seem to make a difference. As the researchers note, the ideology effect exists regardless of supervisor gender.Liberal values vs. conservative valuesThe researchers suggest that the difference in pay is because conservatives and liberals think differently about how rewards should be distributed in society.When it comes to allocating a reward like a bonus, the study states that liberal supervisors are guided by a value system that rejects inequality and embraces change, so they would be more mindful of systemic bias, giving the benefit of the doubt to a female worker who has had to overcome systemic barriers to perform at equal levels.Meanwhile, conservatives lean toward an opposite view. According to the study, conservatives tend to vi ew any gender differences as products of a legitimate system that rewards individuals based on human capital and motivational differences. Under this thinking, if you didnt get that networking opportunity, its not because of structural barriers keeping you out, its because you didnt network hard enough.What you should knowThink tanks, journalists, and advocacy groups have pointed at a lack of flexibility in the workplace, unfair salary disclosure tactics, talent pipeline problems, and sexism that penalizes womens assertiveness as reasons for why the gender pay gap stubbornly continues to exist.But this isnt the first study to show the effects of supervisor political ideology on your career. Another study of the nations top 200 law firms found that the more money that male bosses donate to Republicans, the less likely women are to make partner in that office.So next time youre on a job hunt, theres now one more question to add to your mental checklist Is this boss a liberal or a cons ervative? As a woman, it may behoove you to find out.