NEGLECTED WOMEN AND OTHER IMPLICATIONS OF COMPARABLE WORTH

NEGLECTED WOMEN AND OTHER IMPLICATIONS OF COMPARABLE WORTH

WALTER Y. 01’

Comparable worth proposals presume that the gender wage gap is a result of occupational segregation. The proposals argue that females are channeled into ‘ioomen’s jobs” and that overcrowding depresses women’s wages below the “value” of the work performed. Comparable worth legislation proposes replac- ing the idea of equal pay for equal work with a principle of equal pay for different work of comparable worth determined b y job evaluations. Such job evaluations are feasible only for the public sector and large private employers. The analysis in this paper rec- ognizes that comparable worth wage adjustments are to be limited to the large employers. It examines how employers in the covered sector tend to alter their pay packages and hiring standards. Comparable worth legislation also affects wages in the uncovered sector populated by small employers. The rationing of women’s jobs and the changes in hiring standards for men’s jobs in the covered sector tend to redound to the benefit of smart, energetic women and dull, indolent men.

1. INTRODUCTION

Begin with the individual and before you know it, you have created a type. Begin with a type, and you create nothing. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Rich Boy,” 1951, 207.)

Women are paid less than men. This is an indisputable fact. According to one theory, occupational segregation is responsible for the gender gap. Large numbers of women are channeled into traditionally female jobs, and the resulting oversupply depresses wages below the “true worth” of the work performed. Comparable worth is intended to correct this situation.

Comparable worth proposals address not the individual worker, but rather a job, occupation, or grade level for each employer. Wages are to be adjusted through legislation for whole groups of workers-signers, steno- typists, edger-tailers, librarians, etc. The policy for reform is to begin with a type-the job-and then ascertain the intrinsic worth of the workers on that job in terms of skills, effort, responsibility, and working conditions.

‘Department of Economics, University of Rochester, Rochester, N.Y. 14627. A longer draft of this paper was prepared for a Liberty Fund Conference organized by Professor Karl Brunner, March 1, 1985. I wish to thank the participants at that conference for their com- ments, which influenced this paper. The paper published here was presented at the Sixtieth Annual Conference of Western Economic Association International, Anaheim, Calif., July 1985, in a session organized by John Raisian, Unicon Research Corporation, Los Angela, Calif. A somewhat more technical version of the paper is available by contacting the author.

Contemporary Policy Issues Vol. IV, April 1986

21

22 CONTEMPORARY POLICY ISSUES

Job evaluations are to be made without regard to characteristics of the individuals who staff the position. The requirement that wages be tied to “jobs” limits this policy to the largest employers in the public and private sectors. However, a substantial portion of the labor force is employed by small businesses which do not define job categories, promotion ladders, or hierarchical organizations. Comparable worth policy totally neglects employees in small firms. A correct economic analysis shows that implementing comparable worth tends to harm the majority of women workers.

Men traditionally have supplied the vast majority of labor services to the market, while women largely have borne the responsibilities for child rearing and household production. However, women are moving out of the household and into the labor market for at least three reasons. First, fertil- ity rates plummeted from a rate of 118.3 births per 1,000 women (15 to 44 years of age) in 1955, to a rate of 65.8 births in 1976 (Statistical Abstract 19821 1983, 61). Second, technical innovations have reduced the time required for household production. Third, the relative attractiveness of the labor market has improved as a result of rising real wages and the declining importance of marriage.l Over the 1950-1982 period, the female labor force participation rate rose from 33.9 to 52.6 percent, while the male labor force participation rate fell from 86.4 to 76.6 percent. The sharpest rise from 1950 to 1982 was exhibited by married women in the child- rearing ages (25-34 years old), from 38.8 to 61.5 percent. The share of total employment supplied by women climbed from 28 percent in 1950 to 42 percent in 1980. The proportion of women who will spend two-thirds or more of their adult lives (the interval from 20 to 64 years of age) in the labor force is steadily increasing and is swelling the ranks of those who are vitally concerned with labor market performance.

The gap in the pay of men and women can be described either by the difference between the usual male and female weekly earnings or by a femalelmale gender wage ratio expressed as a percentage. As table 1 indi- cates, the gender wage ratio remained at 62.4 percent from 1967 through 1979, but it rose to 65.6 percent in 1983. Women’s wages are well below those of men, an inequality which comparable worth supposedly would remedy.

111. COMPETITION, DISCRIMINATION, AND SEGREGATION

In a competitive labor market, wages are determined by market demand and supply. According to the human capital model of Gary Becker (1964), individuals who acquire larger stocks of general and firm-specific human capital command higher wages. Exposure to higher work-injury risks, severe working conditions, or unstable employment are likely to yield higher wages which incorporate compensating wage differences. If

II. SIZE AND IMPORTANCE OF THE GENDER WAGE GAP

1. Divorce rates climbed from 9.2 per 1,OOO married women in 1960 to 22.6 in 1980. This is one indicator of the declining attractiveness of marriage as an institution.

01: NEGLECTED WOMEN AND COMPARABLE WORTH 23

TABLE 1 Usual Weekly Earnings of Full-Time Employees

(In Constant 1983 Dollars)

Wages

Male Female Difference Female/Male

1967 __ 1979 1983

$ 374 $ 409 $ 387 $233 $255 $254 $ 141 $ 154 $ 133

62.4% 62.4% 65.6%

women, on average, have less human capital, work fewer hours, or take jobs that provide more agreeable working conditions, they receive lower market wage rates.

Alternative theories contend that women’s wages may be depressed by intentional discrimination, or that women’s wages may be held down- apart from any question of intent-by channeling women into certain occupations. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 addressed the first issue; under its narrow doctrine, employers were obliged to pay the same wages to employees who:

. . . work in the same establishment and who perform equal work on jobs, the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions. (Bureau of National Affairs, Pay Equity, 1984, 13.)

If discrimination was responsible for the pay gap, the relative earnings of women should have climbed following the passage of this act. They did not. The effectiveness of the Equal Pay Act is reduced when men and women are segregated in different occupations and plants.

Occupational segregation provides the motivation for a theory of tacit discrimination. Women are allegedly crowded into certain occupations- e.g., nurses, librarians, receptionists, bookkeepers-by custom or by dis- criminatory hiring and assignment policies. Wages are pushed down by the overcrowding in a narrow range of jobs and do not represent the “value” of the work performed. Treiman and Hartmann (1981) found that annual wages are negatively related to the extent of feminine domination of the job.2 Custom and tacit discrimination apparently erects entry barriers to

2. Treiman and Hartmann (1981, 28-29 and note 13) regressed the annual earnings of men (Y,) and females (Y) on the percentage of women (W) in the occupation and found: f

Yf = 5,751 - 16.3W Y,,, = 8,321 - 29.6W Johnson and Solon (1984) regressed the log of the hourly wage on the fraction of women in

the three-digit occupation for the individual. The coefficient was - 343 for men and - .244 for women. When other control variables were included in the wage equation, the coefficient fell to - .168 for men and - ,090 for women. O’Neill and Sider (1984) examined the scatter diagram of log wages on percentage of females and found a non-linear relation. The hourly wage rate fell as the percentage of females in the occupation was increased from zero to 50 percent, but beyond 50 percent, the hourly wage rose slightly.


the better paying “men’s jobs.” However, if preferences for nicer working conditions, longer paid vacations, and flexible hours are sex biased, a competitive market allocation of workers to jobs could easily generate the kind of occupational segregation emphasized by Treiman and Hartmann (1981), Johnson and Solon (1984), and others.

IV. WAGE ADJUSTMENTS UNDER COMPARABLE WOWH

Anti-discrimination laws requiring “equal pay for equal work” attack the problem at a micro level. The instant proposal addresses pay differences across different jobs. The goal of comparable worth legislation is to extend the principle of “equal pay for equal work” to a broader principle of “equal pay for different work of comparable worth.”

An employer should pay equal pay to men and women who perform different jobs, the value of which is determined by some methods to be the same. (Bureau of National Affairs, Pay Equity, 1984, 18.)

Wage adjustments are to be made on a firm-by-firm basis. No existing proposal has a goal of equalizing pay across different employers.

According to comparable worth proposals, job value is to be administra- tively determined through formal job evaluations. Points are to be assigned for the skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions associated with the “job.” These assessments must be impersonal and sex neutral. They cannot use information on the sex, race, or personal traits (e.g., reliability, honesty, willingness to work overtime, etc.) of individuals invited to occupy the position. Market demand and supply cannot be consulted in measuring the “value” of a job. These guidelines are intended to establish a cardinal ranking of jobs that is independent of market and individual variables. Hence, the evaluation presumably is to ignore differences in local labor market conditions, even though the firm might operate plants in met- ropolitan Los Angeles and rural Oblong, Ill.

The task of measuring the intrinsic worth of different jobs is doomed to failure. In a dynamic economy, the relative value of different jobs is changing over time. In 1950, the weekly earnings of department store salesmen exceeded those of factory workers, but by 1980, this inequality was reversed. Technical advances, changing consumer preferences, and shifts in the supplies of cooperating factors all affect the marginal value product of a worker. Where comparable worth is implemented, disputes surely will arise over the cardinal and ordinal rankings of different jobs. Regulatory and adjudicatory procedures will have to be established to resolve these disputes and to determine when periodic revisions of job evaluations are to be made.

Comparable worth is supposed to correct pay inequities due to gender. The policy evidently is to be limited to “women’s jobs” where women comprise a specified percent or more of total employment. The concept of “women’s jobs” is troubling. Some firms might try to evade the law by


redefining jobs (e.g., pooling computer analysts and bookkeepers) to bring them below the critical specified percentage. The share of women in each job is not a constant. According to Blau and Beller (1984), the proportion of white women employed in male dominated jobs climbed from 12.8 percent in 1971 to 21.1 percent in 1981; the corresponding figures for black women were 11.1 and 17.6 percent. The set of “women’s jobs” eligible for comparable worth wage adjustments certainly will change over time and pose yet another problem for implementing the policy. Finally, if the comparable worth idea becomes widely accepted, the competitive labor market will be replaced by an administrative system of wage determination for all employees.3

V. EMPLOYMENT EFFECTS OF COMPARABLE WORTH WAGE ADJUSTMENTS

The impact of comparable worth can be examined in the context of a one-sector model. Suppose that in a given firm, employees in a predomi- nantly female job A are paid less than those in a male job B. If the two jobs are determined to be “comparable,” the wage in job A will be raised to parity with that in job B. This wage adjustment will reduce the quantity of labor demanded in job A, but substitution and output effects will operate in opposing directions on the demand for labor in job B. Those women who retain their jobs at the higher wage in job A clearly will gain at the expense of those who lose their jobs. The effect of a rise in the wage of job A on workers in the male job B is ambiguous.

Since job evaluations cannot be conducted in small firms, comparable worth must be limited to workers in large firms. Part-time employees, who comprise 11.6 percent of all male employees and 29.6 percent of female employees, also are likely to be exempted. Current Population Survey (May 1983) data reveal that 35.6 percent of all workers in the private sector and 33.0 percent of women are employed by firms with 1,000 or more employees. Wage adjustments under comparable worth are likely to reduce female employment in the large firms (the covered sector). Those who lose their jobs must seek work in the uncovered sector, where competitive market forces determine wages and employment. If the higher-paid female jobs in the covered sector are rationed by queues in a manner analogous to the minimum-wage model of Mincer (1984), an outflow of disemployed women to the uncovered sector may result. However, the outflow will occur only when the vacancy rate is less than the elasticity of demand for labor by large firms. Competition through queues likely will raise the level of frictional unemployment and its attendant costs.

3. In the language of the Bureau of National Affairs report, “If evaluation systems become the norm, and the comparable worth system becomes well accepted, it is possible that a chal- lenge based on the claim, other than sex discrimination, could be litigated (probably in state court) by employees who claim that their jobs are under-valued when compared to similar jobs held by members of the same sex.” (Bureau of National Affairs 1984,31.)


VI. TRADE-OFFS IN THE COMPENSATION OF EMPLOYEES

Fringe benefits account for a substantial part of total employee compensation. These include (a) the legally required contributions for Social Secu- rity, unemployment insurance, and worker compensation; (b) outlays for private pensions, health insurance, and other “in-kind” payments; and (c) pay for hours not worked-vacations, holidays, and sick leave. Wages usu- ally are measured by earnings per hour paid. However, total compensation per hour actually worked more closely approximates the full cost per hour of labor services. According to 1983 data, the ratio of total compensation to wages was 1.423 for employees in large private firms and 1.513 for federal civil service workers4 If employers are forced to pay higher wages to com- ply with the comparable worth wage floors, they will try to economize on the other components of total compensation. Specifically, higher wages will be substituted for lower fringes in the form of shorter vacations, smaller pensions, or changes in the mix of employee^.^ Firms would prefer to reduce fringes just for those employed in the female-dominated jobs. However, such blatant discrimination in fringe benefits is unlikely to be allowed, since present laws require that the same compensation package be offered to all of a firm’s employees.

A job is a tied bundle. A worker is paid for the time and effort he/she supplies to the employer. However, the worker is obliged to accept the conditions at the work site and the companionship and cooperation of fellow employees. The worker’s total compensation is the sum of wages plus fringes and paid leave. Additionally, helshe may receive benefits in the form of on-the-job training. Women on average receive less on-the-job training than men, and, as a consequence, they receive lower wages and exhibit flatter age-earnings profiles. At least two reasons for the flatter profiles can be advanced. First, potential years of work experience may be a poor proxy for actual experience, especially for women who have weaker

4. These calculations are based on data from an Office of Personnel Management (1983) memorandum. Total hourly pay (C) is related to hourly wages (W) through the identity,

c = +-) l + b

where b is the ratio of fringe benefits costs to earnings, and a is the ratio of hours actually worked to hours paid. Data for the private sector, obtained from the PATC survey, revealed that b = .2145, and a = .8538. The Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys on employee benefits indicate that both b and a are considerably lower for small firms. Part-time employees and temporary workers rarely get paid holidays, and receive few fringe benefits other than those that are legally required.

5. The tax rates for the legally required fringes, such as Social Security, are beyond the f i ’ s control. The other fringes, especially the ratio of actual hours worked to hours paid, can be influenced through the makeup of the firm’s work force. An increase in the ratio of part- time to full-time employees will reduce the pay-to-wage ratio (C/W).

0 1 : NEGLECTED WOMEN AND COMPARABLE WORTH 27

attachments to the labor force.6 Second, jobs are not all alike. If individual A acquires a year of experience on a casual, nontraining job, hislher age- earnings profile will be flatter than that of individual By who got a year of experience on a job that jointly supplied training and work. Mincer and Polachek (1974) argued that both reasons contributed to the flatter female age-earnings profiles observed in the cross-sectional data. Japanese data on wages and job tenure, shown in table 2, exhibit a clear U-shaped age profile for the female/male gender wage ratio. The female/male ratio of firm-specific job tenure also follows a U-shaped curve. The least-squares regression of the gender wage ratio on the ratio of firm-specific job tenure shows a significant positive relation~hip.~ This result lends strong support to a neoclassical, human capital model of wage determination.

Workers attach positive values to training, and firms that offer training can attract new workers at lower wages than those that do not. If firms are required to pay super-normal wages, they likely will change the “job package.” Mincer (1984) argued that when wage floors are raised by minimum- wage laws or union contracts, firms adjust by supplying less training. This results in a flatter age-earnings profile, as workers accept higher current wages in lieu of high future wages. Thus, comparable worth could be expected to result in less on-the-job training and hence lower rates of wage growth.

TABLE 2 Monthly Wages and Years of Job Tenure in Japan (1980)

(All Industries by Sex and Age)

Age Group

18-19 20-24 25-29 3 w 4 3539 4 @ 4 4 45-49 5054 5559 60-64

Monthly Wages Female Male Ratio

$ 99.20 $116.30 0.853 114.90 142.40 0.807 129.40 181.10 0.715 131.10 219.70 0.597 128.50 251.60 0.511 124.10 266.40 0.456 127.20 270.40 0.470 134.60 264.20 0.509 130.00 226.10 0.575 121.70 180.90 0.673

~ _ _ _ -

Job Tenure Female Male Ratio

1.10 yrs. 1.00 yrs. 1.100 2.90 2.90 1.000 5.50 5.90 0.932 6.70 9.10 0.736 7.00 12.60 0.556 7.50 14.80 0.507 8.70 16.50 0.527

10.60 17.80 0.596 10.60 13.70 0.774 10.80 10.10 1.069

Source: Basic Wage Survey, Japan.

6. Basing his calculations on the 1967 National Longitudinal Survey data, O’Neill (1984b) found that the ratio of actual to potential years of work experience was 0.44 for 30-35 year old white women, and 0.53 for black women. Biases due to the use of potential experience as a proxy for actual work experience were analyzed by Garvey and Reimers (1980).

7. (W,/W,) = .179 + .563(I,/J,) [R* = .879, N = 101 [7.62]


VII. THE RELATION BETWEEN FIRM SIZE AND WAGES

As can be seen in table 3, firm size is systematically related to differences in wages, job tenure, and composition of employment. According to Cur- rent Population Survey (May 1979) data, 42.8 percent of all employees were in large firms with 1,000 or more employees.8 Female employment was more heavily concentrated in small firms (30.1 percent, whereas 33.9 percent were employed in large firms). Wages of men in large firms were 54 percent higher than wages of men in small firms; the differential was only 37 percent for women. The gender wage ratio measured by average hourly earnings fell from 72.8 to 62.9 percent across the five firm-size groups. Part of the firm-size differential in hourly wages can be explained by worker and job characteristics. Small firms more heavily represent trades and services and hire more part-time employees. Mellow (1982) included these variables in a wage equation, and estimated that the firm-size wage differential fell to 24.7 percent.

TABLE 3 Employment, Job Tenure, and Wages by Firm Size and Sex: 1979

(A11 Industries, May 1979 Current Population Survey Data)

Variable

Male Employees Employment Job Tenure (yrs.) Wages Earnings

Female Employees Employment Job Tenure (yrs.) Wages Earnings

FemaleIMale Ratios Employment Job Tenure Wages Earnings

~~

In Firms with Employment of:

Total 1-24 25-99 100-499 500-999 1,OOO+ ~~~~~~

10,428 2,591 1,491 1,376 506 4,464 9.57 6.44 7.76 8.90 9.93 11.63

$ 7.276 $ 5.495 $ 6.581 $ 7.366 $ 7.741 $ 8.462 $15,563 $11,280 $14,070 $15,836 $16,650 $18,340

8,136 2,452 1,177 1,246 501 2,760

$ 4.76 $ 4.00 $ 4.32 $ 4.93 $ 5.03 $ 5.49 $ 8,521 $ 6,240 $ 7,759 $ 9,164 $ 9,163 $10,467

7.05 5.91 6.30 6.97 7.49 8.10

78.02 94.64 78.94 90.55 99.01 61.83 73.67 91.77 81.19 78.31 75.43 69.65 65.42 72.79 65.64 66.93 64.98 64.88 54.75 55.32 55.15 57.85 55.03 57.07

8. I wish to thank Barbara Mann and Wesley Mellow for their assistance in preparing t h i s table. Annual earnings were computed as the product of usual weekly earnings times usual weeks worked. Comparable tables muld be tabulated from the Current Population Survey (May 1983), which contains data on firm and plant size.


Oi (1983b) argued that large firms make larger investments in firm- specific human capital, and that the returns are shared by the workers and empIoyer. This is confirmed by the shape of the age-earnings profiles, which are steeper for workers in larger firms (see Hashimoto and Raisian 1984). Thus, large firms have more incentive to design compensation packages that encourage longer job tenures, which raise the returns to training. The data show that men have longer job tenures (9.57 years vs. 7.05 years for women). Further, to the extent that large firms face higher monitoring costs, they will demand more productive workers (possibly by demanding higher levels of work effort) to reduce the monitoring cost per efficiency unit of the labor input. If men are willing to put forth greater work effort and maintain lower turnover rates, then hiring, retention, and wage policies are not likely to be sex neutral.

VIII. COMPLIANCE WITH COMPARABLE WORTH WAGE STANDARDS

Wages in some (possibly all) female-dominated jobs tend to be raised in firms covered by comparable worth legislation. In addition to reductions in employment, fringes, and training resulting from these wage advances, comparable worth induces two further demand responses. First, the firm is likely to substitute male workers for female workers in female jobs if the former are more productive. Second, and more importantly, the firm is likely to change the quality of its labor inputs. Hiring standards and effort levels will tend to rise in the female jobs and simultaneously fall in the male jobsg In general, if the quality of both types of labor can be varied, the firm will raise the acceptable productivity level for female employees and lower it for males in the comparable jobs. Comparable worth thus creates a productive inefficiency, because it pays the firm to demand sub-optimal quality of male employees and super-normal quality of female workers.

When labor quality or worker productivity can be varied-by changing the work pace or the work-effort standard, etc.-comparable worth imposes costs not only on disemployed women forced to seek jobs in the uncovered sector. It also imposes costs on the more productive and skilled men who are bumped by less productive employees so as to reduce the height of the comparable worth wage floor. Thus, smart and energetic women, as well as dull and indolent men, can expect to benefit if comparable worth legislation passes.

IX. THE LABOR MARKET ADJUSTMENTS TO COMPARABLE WORTH

Under comparable worth, the wage advances in the covered sector obviously improve the incomes of women getting these “good feminine jobs.” However, disemployed women drive down wages in the uncovered sector.

9. A simple model demonstrating the rationale for these quality adjustments is presented in an earlier version of this paper. It is available by contacting the author.


This reduces not only their welfare, but also that of other full-time and part-time females regularly employed by small businesses. To the extent that competition for the “good jobs” involves job queues, the policy will result in higher frictional unemployment. This artificially induced idleness is a waste of resources. Firms will try to reduce the cost of complying with the policy by cutting fringe benefits. One way is to increase the number of part-time employees, who rarely are entitled to fringe benefits or paid vacations. Mincer (1984) showed that wage floors set above market equilibrium wages lead to smaller investments in on-the-job training, and that this results in flatter age-earnings profiles. If the wage floors erected by comparable worth produce the same responses, the policy will have the unde- sirable consequence of reducing future wage growth rates as firms supply less on-the-job training-especially in the female-dominated jobs.

The debate over comparable worth has wholly neglected the policy’s impact on wages and employment in the uncovered sector, and on the welfare of small businesses. It is reasonable to assume that where comparable worth is implemented, the high cost of conducting job evaluations will exempt nearly all private firms with fewer than 1,000 employees. Thus, comparable worth probably will be applied only to employees in the public sector and in very large private firms. The policy is analytically equivalent to imposing a structure of differential payroll taxes on females in this covered sector. The proceeds of these imaginary taxes are paid to those fortu- nate enough to hold these “good feminine jobs.” These implicit taxes raise the marginal costs of production of the covered firms. The covered firms then contract, relative to the output of small firms. Wages fall and employment expands in the uncovered sector, which Doeringer and Piore (1971) called “the secondary labor market.” The policy obviously changes the equilibrium size distribution of firms, and this impact is magnified if the large firms successfully evade the policy by subcontracting with small businesses.1° Since these implicit payroll taxes are imposed only on large firms, whose importance varies across industries, comparable worth can be expected to affect the equilibrium structure of product prices. Specifically, the prices of manufactured goods will tend to rise relative to the prices of services, since large firms account for larger shares of output in manufac- turing. Thus, part of the costs of a comparable worth program will be shifted to consumers, whose preferences prompt them to spend larger por- tions of their budgets on manufactured goods.

Finally, jobs and workers are heterogeneous. Pay and employment prac- tices vary as a function of firm size, and large firms demand more work effort (and hence pay higher wages) to attract more productive employees.

10. Firms that provide “temporary help” have always been around. In recent years, “employee leasing” firms have emerged, evidently in response to the complexity of payroll taxes and to the economies of supplying fringe benefits. Although these labor-leasing firms serve mainly small employers, they could expand as sub-contractors to large firms to supply certain types of labor (such as receptionists, keypunch operators, etc.).


There also are reasons to assume that the effort intensities of male jobs are, on average, higher than those of female jobs, and this could account for part of the gender wage gap. A policy requiring employers to pay the same wage “to men and women who perform different jobs, the value of which is determined by some methods to be the same” surely will affect the design of jobs (the requisite skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions), as well as the performance standards expected of those who staff such jobs. Hiring standards and the pace of work surely will be advanced if women’s wages are raised. At the same time, covered employers will substitute less productive individuals-and thus slow the speed of the assembly lines-in male-dominated jobs that are judged to be comparable with women’s jobs.

The size of the gender wage gap has narrowed in the past five years. The compensation package and the character of a job (its working conditions, the amount of specific job training, the pace of work, etc.) are continually adjusted to equilibrate the demand and supply of various labor services. I contend there is no sex neutral method to ascertain the value or worth of a job that is free of labor market considerations and person-specific attri- butes. The prevailing labor market cannot be replaced by an administrative system of wage determination without incurring substantial economic costs. Advocates of comparable worth simply have not carried out the appropriate economic analyses. Attempts to contract the gender wage gap through comparable worth legislation clearly are contrary to the well- being of a majority of neglected women workers whose wages will continue to be determined by market forces in an uncovered labor market. Com- parable worth wage adjustments can only be implemented for those women’s positions where job evaluations can be conducted. The proponents of comparable worth are silent about its impact on the neglected women who find employment with small firms.

32 CONTEMPOMY POLICY ISSUES

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Documents

NEGLECTED WOMEN AND OTHER IMPLICATIONS OF COMPARABLE WORTH