Contexts of System Justification and System Evaluation: Exploring the Social Comparison Strategies of the (Not Yet) Contented Female Worker

Those who are historic targets of discrimination seem surprisingly likely to accept their situation, a phenomenon Jost and Banaji (1994) call system justification. One assumption in system justification theory, however, is that the need to justify builds over time as individuals develop an investment in the system they have implicitly helped to perpetuate. This possibility was tested as it relates to social comparison of pay. An experimental study involving 100 participants (50 men and 50 women) found that women made intragroup comparisons with other women to gauge their satisfaction with a pay rate when it was framed as compensation for past work but they made intergroup comparisons with men to gauge their satisfaction with a pay rate when it was framed as part of an offer for future employment.