Comparable Worth In Gender Studies Research Paper

The National Research Council has concluded, ‘not only do women do different work than men, but the work women do is paid less, and the more an occupation is dominated by women, the less it pays’ (Treiman and Hartmann 1981). Using national US Census data, they found that each additional percentage point female in an occupation is associated with a $42 penalty in median annual earnings. Paula England’s (1992) summary of many studies concludes that as much as 30 to 37 percent of the wage gap is a result of gender segregation at work combined with the tendency to pay women’s jobs less, net of their requirements for education, skill, and difficult working conditions. According to a recent study done by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a typical 29-year-old woman with a college degree stands to lose approximately $990,000 in wages over her working life as a result of the wage gap. Comparable worth, also known as pay equity, emerged in the US in the late 1970s and 1980s to correct for the gender-based gap in wages that is a by-product of occupational segregation.

Comparable worth broadens the scope of equal pay for equal work legislation. It requires that dissimilar jobs of equivalent worth to the employer be paid the same wages. Comparable worth examines the extent to which work done primarily by women is systematically undervalued because that work has been and continues to be done primarily by women. Systematic undervaluation means that the wages paid to those who perform historically female work are lower than they would be if these jobs had been and were being performed by white males. Comparable worth involves correcting the widespread practice of paying women less than white men for work that requires equivalent skills, effort, responsibilities, and working conditions (Steinberg 1984). It seeks to remove ‘femaleness’ as a factor depressing the wage rate for historically female work. It attempts to base wages solely on the productive contribution of the work performed to the overall objectives of a work organization, removing the effect on wages of the sex of the typical incumbent.

1. Historical Background

Assumptions about gender that pervade the structure of compensation have their origins in nineteenth-century assumptions about the gender division of labor and the cult of domesticity. (For a fuller document see Steinberg and Figart 2000.) Specifically, by the end of the nineteenth century, occupational segregation had intensified, allowing for the development of a two-tiered wage structure by the gender of the typical job incumbent. Not only was the two-tiered wage structure taken for granted, it was also a legal workplace practice.

Several decades later, these breadwinner–home-maker ideologies were institutionalized into the wage structure through job evaluation procedures. Job evaluation systematically orders jobs as more or less complex and more or less valuable to the organization’s mission for the purpose of paying wages. Jobs are described and assessed in terms of relevant job content characteristics. Wage rates are based on these assessments of job content. Individuals performing the jobs are assumed to have the required knowledge, skills, and character to perform the job competently.

Job evaluation systems can be traced back over 100 years, although their use in the private sector became widespread in the 1950s (Treiman 1979). Job evaluation systems in use today have their roots in systems first developed in the 1940s and 1950s (Steinberg 1992). Early evaluation systems and even most current systems use existing wage rates for jobs as the basis for determining what types of job content were complex. For example, if responsibility for supervising a work unit was found to be positively correlated to wages, then supervising a work unit was treated as complex work. At the other extreme, if a low-paying job involved working with the public, then working with the public was defined as simple work. Once a hierarchy of complexity had been established based on existing wages, all references to the derivation of the hierarchy were dropped (Schwab 1980). The fact that job content measures were a proxy for existing wages was lost.

Contemporary job evaluation systems appear to be scientific and objective in their assessment of job content, but actually have built into them gendered cultural assumptions from the 1940s and 1950s including the two-tiered wage structure. Modifications of these systems since the 1950s have been largely cosmetic. Kim (1989) found, for example, that 1986 salaries in California State public employment were affected by explicit assumptions about gender embedded in a compensation system established in 1931. These assumptions pervade the wage structure because over two-thirds of all employers use some form of job evaluation as the basis for their compensation policies. Comparable worth first emerged as a policy objective during World War II, when the War Labor Board required that employers abide by equal pay for equal worth (Milkman 1987). This policy was honored in the breach. Several states did, however, enact equal pay for equal work laws, primarily in response to union pressure to protect male wages from being lowered when women replaced them during the War. Early drafts of the federal equal pay legislation, endorsed by the Kennedy administration, included language that required equal pay for ‘work of com-parable character on jobs the performance of which requires comparable skills. Final legislation substituted the word ‘equal’ for ‘comparable’ (Steinberg 1984, Hutner 1986).

The contemporary comparable worth movement in the US crystallized in the late 1970s. In 1974, the State of Washington conducted the first comparable pay study. In 1979, the newly constituted National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) convened a national conference. In 1981, the Supreme Court of Washington State in County of Washington . Gunther found illegal differential pay between women prison guards and male prison guards, based on the content of their work. Also in 1981, the NAS report, Women, Work and Wages: Equal Pay for Work of Equal Value, was published (Treiman and Hartmann 1981). It found strong evidence for gender-based discrimination and legitimated the claims of comparable worth advocates.

The pace of activity on comparable worth accelerated in the US in the 1980s. By the end of that decade, all but five states had at least investigated gender differentials in their civil service pay scales. Over 50 municipalities, 25 counties, 60 school districts, and nearly 250 colleges and universities had investigated comparable worth inequities. Many enacted wage adjustments for historically female occupations.

In 1978, the federal government of Canada enacted the Canadian Human Rights Act, which established equal pay for worth of equal value. By 1990, 9 of the 12 Canadian provinces had adopted pay equity legislation. The 1987 Ontario Pay Equity Act, the most far reaching pay equity legislation to date, requires that comparable worth be proactively established in all private firms with 10 or more incumbents, as well as in the public sector. It requires as well that job evaluation systems be gender-neutral in their assessment of work complexity (Cuneo 1990).

The pace of initial comparable worth efforts began to slow considerably in the late 1980s in the US and in the mid-1990s in Canada. In the US, this was due to a disappointing turnaround in legal decisions, to President Reagan’s landslide victory in 1984, to President Clinton’s reluctance to support labor policies that intervene directly in the labor contract, to the lessening fear among politicians at the state level of the gender gap at the polls, to the decline in membership and power of organized labor, and to the successful containment of reform implementation by employers (Steinberg 1991). Nonetheless, according to an IWPR study, in the US, $527 million in pay equity adjustments have been disbursed by 20 state governments.

2. Job Evaluation And Gender Bias

Job evaluation is the institutional mechanism that perpetuates wage discrimination, especially in medium-sized and large organizations. Approximately two-thirds of all employers use some form of job evaluation. A minority of work organizations set wages without using these formal processes. They rely instead on local market wages, employer biases, and institutional inertia in setting wages. However, if large employers modified job evaluation practices to pay women fairly, smaller employers who do not use such procedures would be affected by these outcomes. There are many aspects of gender bias that remain in virtually every traditional job evaluation system currently available to employers (Steinberg and Haignere 1987, Acker 1989, Steinberg 1990). Four of the most common forms of bias are discussed below.

First, the prerequisites, tasks, and work context of jobs historically performed by women have been ignored or taken-for-granted. Working with mentally ill or dying patients or reporting to multiple super-visors are not considered to be stressful working conditions. Working with noisy machinery, however, is considered stressful. University secretaries who protect the confidentiality of the records they work with do not receive compensation for that responsibility. When examining the skills associated with clerical work, most job evaluation system’s treat as invisible requirements for knowledge of spelling and grammar, ability to compose straightforward correspondence, knowledge of the substantive work of the office, and knowledge of the organizational short-cuts within a bureaucracy. The ability of a public health nurse to break down complex and technical material to present to nontechnical audiences is also not acknowledged as a communication skill in traditional job evaluation. If job content remains un-acknowledged in the process of describing and evaluating jobs, it is not taken into account when determining a wage rate.

Second, evaluation systems confuse the content of the job with stereotypic ideas about the characteristics of the typical jobholder. Since authority is associated with masculinity, managers are perceived as running offices and departments. The work of the secretary in the actual daily running of an office remains invisible, especially if she performs her work competently. The technical skills and life-and-death responsibilities required of a Registered Nurse are often subordinated to her perceived responsibility for the emotional comfort of her patients. Social psychological experiments confirm that the value of an activity is lowered simply by its association with women (Shepala and Viviano 1984).

Third, the content of work historically performed by women is recognized in the evaluation hierarchy of complexity, but, by definition, is assumed to be less complex than the content of work historically per- formed by men. For example, both women’s and men’s jobs require perceptual skills. Male jobs are more likely to require spatial perceptual skills, female jobs visual skills (England 1992). In traditional job evaluation systems spatial skills are treated as more complex than visual skills. Similarly, women’s and men’s work both require human relations skills, but the human relations skills associated with men’s work often involve power and control, while the human relations skills in women’s work often involve taking care of others. Job evaluation systems define power and control over others as involving more complex skills than emotional labor. Virtually every off-the- shelf system of job evaluation defines skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions in way’s that treat the job content of male work as more complex than that of female work.

Fourth, some job evaluation systems negatively value job content associated with female jobs in a way that actually lowers wages. One study of a major university found that staff whose jobs involved working with students on a regular basis actually ‘lost’ pay for that aspect of their job net of other aspects of their job content. Another study found that working with difficult clients and dying patients actually lowered pay independent of other job content. The ironic logic of this evaluation outcome is that the more an incumbent is required to perform the undervalued content, the less the incumbent earns.

3. Gender Neutral Job Evaluation For Comparable Worth

To achieve comparable worth, it is necessary to cleanse traditional compensation practices of those gender biases of which we are aware. Achieving this goal requires recognition that systems of job evaluation have been socially constructed. Thus, they can be socially reconstructed to achieve gender neutrality. Early comparable worth initiatives attempted to modify traditional job evaluation systems. In Oregon, for example, a major compensation consulting firm, Hay Associates, agreed in principle to modify its own job evaluation system (Acker 1989). Yet, in practice, the consultants fought against all but minor changes proposed by the Task Force directing the project. When Hay modified its system, the changes had little bearing on the evaluations of the actual jobs being assessed. Some of the lower paid historically female jobs received wage adjustments, but the original hierarchy of job complexity was left intact. More recently, technical pay equity proponents have begun to design gender-neutral evaluation systems to measure job content. The new systems measure more accurately and positively value the invisible skills associated with historically female jobs. One way in which gender neutral job evaluation minimizes gender bias is by developing new dimensions of job complexity or new job factors to capture work differentially found in historically female work. An example is the construction of a factor for Emotional Effort. This factor measures the intensity of effort required to deal directly with the needs of patients, customers, clients, citizens, and coworkers in assisting, instructing, caring for, or comforting them. Hierarchies of complexity are built: dealing with clients who are unpredictably hostile or confused, or discussing death with the terminally ill and their families, is assessed as requiring more emotional effort than dealing with coworkers who are seeking information. The emotional effort of both female and male jobs is assessed in relation to a consistent metric.

A second way in which gender-neutral job evaluation reforms traditional job evaluation is by including and revaluing previously unacknowledged or under-valued characteristics of historically female work in measures of job content already included. For example, in a gender-neutral system, the measurement of Human Relations Skills would not only encompass the skills necessary to supervise subordinates and the skills necessary to speak with top-level executives of organizations. It would also include the skills required to deal effectively with or care for others or to shape, affect, or influence others’ feelings, actions, or decisions. Similarly, a job factor on Communication Skills would not only recognize and positively value writing complexity, it would also recognize that presenting technical information to an audience where the level of understanding varies involves more complex communications skills than presenting technical information to a technical audience (Steinberg 1999).

Gender neutral job evaluation is almost never used in pay equity initiatives in the US and only rarely used in Canada. It remains a technical solution in search of a political base with sufficient power to implement it.

4. Containment Of Pay Equity

Comparable worth advocates have not fared well in their efforts to reform the systems of job evaluation that are used in pay equity initiatives. Public sector employers that enacted pay equity early, such as Minnesota, Washington State, and San Jose, California, did so using unmodified traditional job evaluation. While political expediency in these jurisdictions did result in raising wages for those who work in historically female jobs, it did not remove most of the sources of gender bias from compensation systems. During the second phase of pay equity initiatives, advocates were well aware of the biases of traditional job evaluation, but political resistance to the modification of traditional job evaluation was formidable. Pay equity was not openly opposed. Instead, it was effectively contained, as illustrated by the Oregon example. Most strategies of containment involved manipulation of the process and results of traditional job evaluation. Employers gave the appearance of full cooperation with advocates, but structured decision making around the study in a way that would minimize advocate input and thus minimize both the economic costs of the reform and the changes in compensation practices (Steinberg 1991).

How did these containment tactics work? One strategy involved turning political decisions, such as what constitutes a female-dominated job, into technical decisions and making them nonnegotiable. How much should educational job requirements be valued relative to supervisory responsibilities? Determining the relative importance to overall job value of different dimensions of job content is one of the most important decisions involved in a job evaluation exercise. It is a political decision requiring debate and consensus. It is typically obscured, however, as a technical decision. A second strategy involves withholding information from political advocates until it is too late for them to do anything about it. In Oregon, by the time the pay equity advocates on the Task Force understood the implications of the actions of the consultants, their choice was to abandon the project entirely or accept the flawed results. They accepted the results.

A third strategy, perhaps the one most frequently used by employers, involves placing proponents in a minority position on a Task Force or dividing them among themselves. Most often, trade union advocates are initially placed in a privileged position and representatives of women’s groups are marginalized. When they must unite in opposing employer efforts to undercut the reform, their distrust of each other makes common action difficult, if not impossible.

With the availability of Gender Neutral Job Evaluation, achieving pay equity becomes less a technical than a political challenge. But it is a formidable political challenge. Comparable worth is a political goal well worth fighting for. Cleansing compensation systems of gender bias would put an extra $1,500–5,000 per year in the paychecks of those performing historically female work. Even flawed studies with gender biased evaluation systems have resulted in important wage increases for hundreds of thousands of women. For many women, it represents the difference between poverty and economic autonomy. It would empower women as decision makers in their families. It would make visible and positively reward the productive contribution of women’s labor market work.

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