Study: Little Boys More Likely to Get an Allowance Than Little Girls

This is so perfectly perfect you’ll rage-laugh about it for the rest of the day: Boys are more likely to get an allowance than girls. Men are literally handed more money from birth. But of course it’s obviously because five-year-old boys are disproportionately working in STEM jobs and haven’t opted for the “mommy track.”

The numbers come from a cutesy survey by Junior Achievement, about teens’ college plans and spending habits. But ThinkProgress plucked out a depressing stat, which is that more boys get an allowance than girls: 67 percent versus 59 percent. It’s not because they’re putting in long hours, either:

One study found that girls do two more hours of housework a week than boys, while boys spend twice as much time playing. The same study confirmed that boys are still more likely to get paid for what they do: they are 15 percent more likely to get an allowance for doing chores than girls. A 2009 survey of children ages 5 to 12 found that far more girls are assigned chores than boys.

According to another survey, boys did 2.1 hours of chores for $48, while girls did 2.7 hours for $45. It’s probably outdoor work that accounts for the difference. Our contempt for the feminized work of homemaking begins early, in other words!

Obviously, this is not some comprehensive study conducted by a tenured professor and based on numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But it’s not surprising, either, and it’s worth remembering the next time you look at a story about the wage gap.

Also interesting: the Junior Achievement survey says teen girls are actually giving more thought than boys to the financial end of college.

Seventy-nine percent of teen girls (ages 13-18) plan to seek scholarships/grants to pay for college, compared to 66 percent of boys 13-18. Sixty-six percent of teen girls say the rising costs of college have changed their decisions about their future college plans (versus 57 percent of teen boys), and 40 percent of teen girls say they are considering staying in-state to save money on tuition costs (versus 30 percent of teen boys).

Next time you see a little girl running a lemonade stand, make sure you leave a tip. The little tycoon probably needs all the encouragement she can get.