Discrimination and deprivation: The effects of social comparisons

This article deals with relative deprivation with regard to wages, particularly the effects of gender and occupational sex-type on justice evaluations and on the perception of individual and fraternal deprivation. Underlying this analysis of the factors that allow perceived discrimination to be translated into feelings of deprivation is the basic assumption that workers in different occupational and gender categories report different levels of relative deprivation primarily because of their diverse comparison criteria for evaluating their rewards. The empirical findings point to systematic gender and occupation-type differences in choice of comparison others and in justice considerations.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the 1988 meetings of the Social Justice and Societal problems convention, Leiden, The Netherlands.