EQUAL PAY LEGISLATION

Equal Pay Legislation

Equal Pay Legislation

Introduction

Comparable worth is a policy implemented by a small number of state, local, and national governments to remedy wage disparities between men and women due to occupational segregation, a situation in which women are more likely to be employed in low-paying occupations and men are more likely to be employed in high-paying occupations. Comparable worth requires “equal pay” for “equal worth,” where worth or value is not determined by the market but via a job-rating scheme that assigns point values to different job attributes, such as skill level, responsibility, and working conditions, and aggregates them to a measure of job worth or value. Jobs with equal value would be paid the same wage; jobs with higher value would be paid a higher wage; and jobs with lower value would be paid a lower wage. In addition to raising wages in female-dominated occupations, comparable worth might also lower wages in male-dominated occupations.

Proponents of comparable-worth legislation view the negative relationship between wages and the proportion of females in a given occupation as an under-valuation by society of “women's work” relative to “men's work.” For these proponents, such undervaluation of work performed primarily by females is thought to arise from two sources. The first source, crowding, refers to the large number of women forced into certain occupations as a result of discrimination. The large supply of women to these occupations depresses wages. The second is society's devaluation of work performed by women simply because it is performed by women. Evidence presented for this thesis is that earnings are statistically negatively related to the proportion of women in an occupation, even after controlling for observable and measurable job characteristics. Comparable worth is proposed as a way to raise the wages of women in female-dominated occupations to their “true” higher value.

Early EU legislation attempting to address the inequality of pay between men and women included the EU Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the EU Civil Rights Act of 1964. Similar legislation was put in place in the 1970s in other industrialized countries, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Spain, and France. The focus of this legislation was the provision of “equal pay for equal work” performed by both men and women. However, critics claimed that because of occupational segregation, men and women were rarely performing equal work. As a response to this perceived inequality, comparable-worth policy was first proposed in the United States in the late 1970s to instead promote “equal pay for equal value.” In the United States, comparable worth was primarily adopted by state and local governments rather than private employers, as public employers are not subject to profit-maximizing constraints. However, when other industrialized countries followed suit in the early 1980s, some required comparable worth in the private sector as well. Some people believe that unions have the potential to bring comparable worth to the private sector in the United States as a result of the increasing feminization of labor ...