Boys Get Paid Twice As Much Allowance As Girls, New Study Finds

Equal pay for equal work. Women have been fighting for it for years. The problem, however, is that gender pay discrimination may run deeper than anyone could have imagined ⏤ as in all the way back to childhood. According to a new study by BusyKid.com, a chore and allowance app, parents are paying their sons twice as much in allowance as they are their daughters. Boys are making something in the ballpark of $14 a week. But girls? Just about $7.

Why they are doing this, however, remains unclear. It’s well documented that parents both impose and pass on their biases to their children. So paying boys more allowance than girls could just be an offshoot of the everyday sexism that plagues the work world, and the Busy Kid survey is just highlighting this.

Gregg Murset, the founder of BusyKid.com, said his company analyzed the data from 10,000 families who use their app and noted that, while there are some parents who pay their kids evenly for work they do around the house, they were more exception than the rule. What the study didn’t take into account were the ages of the children or whether parents paid older kids more money than younger kids for the same chores. A different Busy Kid study found that just 21 percent of parents talk regularly about money with their children while only 10 percent expressed an interest in teaching them how to manage it.

For Murset, that’s a big problem. “One of the things that’s so hard is to teach our kids with something they don’t see anymore. We used to do cash and coin. Not anymore. We are trying to teach kids about invisible money,” Murset said. “We have to bridge the gap for them. So they learn, ‘Oh, I get up off the couch, I do some work and it turns into money, the number on the screen grows. “