Who should bring home the bacon? How deterministic views of gender constrain spousal wage preferences

•Narrowing of the gender wage gap may be impeded by Gender Deterministic (GD) beliefs.•High GD beliefs increase preferences for, and work choices to promote, a gender wage gap.•These results hold regardless of age, life-stage, and other life choices.

Despite the rise of dual-income households in the United States and a narrowing of the nation’s gender wage gap, we find that many men and women still prefer the husband to be the primary breadwinner. To help explain intra-marital wage preferences, we argue for a new construct, gender determinism, which captures the extent to which a person believes gender categories dictate individual characteristics. We show that deterministic views of gender increase both intra-marital wage gap preferences and work choices that may perpetuate the gender wage gap. Our results hold in both student and non-student samples, suggesting some endurance of these beliefs. We discuss how our findings contribute to extant research on implicit person theory and gender role theory, and the implications of our findings for gender wage equity.