Comparable Worth New Directions for Research (1985) / Chapter Skim
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Report of a Seminar: An Agenda for Basic Research on Comparable Worth
Report of a Seminar: An Agenda for Basic Research on Comparable Worth
Pages 1-34
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Report of a Seminar
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Indeed, it was identified as "the civil rights issue of the eighties" by Eleanor Holmes Norton when she was chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Norton, 19791. Increasingly the claim is heard that jobs ought to be paid according to their intrinsic worth, as measured by such factors as skill required, responsibility entailed, and effort involved, and that the wage levels of jobs of "comparable worth," that is, equal worth or equal value, ought to be equal.
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Via job evaluation procedures, which attempt to establish objective criteria for such job features as skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions, the relative value of jobs is established and wage rates are realigned accordingly. The general goal of a comparable worth strategy is pay equity equitable occupational wage rates that are not influenced by the sex, race, orethnicity of the incumbents.
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In this context it should be pointed out that the concept of comparable worth is as relevant to the relative wage rates of jobs held disproportionately by minority groups as it is to "women's jobs." To the extent that "minority jobs" exist and their wage levels are influenced by race-based wage discrimination, remedies using the comparable worth approach would apply. The wage levels of jobs that are held predominantly by minority women may be even more depressed by discrimination.
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Since existing job evaluation procedures appear to be the principal available method, attention needs to be devoted to improving job evaluation procedures and modifying them to make them appropriate for the assessment of pay discrimination. In particular, the extent of social judgment bias in existing job evaluation systems needs to be assessed and, if it is substantial, eliminated.
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It is likely that each discipline will view priorities somewhat differently. In the following, research topics with more immediate practical application to issues of comparable worth implementation are discussed in the section immediately below, "Research on Comparable Worth and Other Wage Adjustment Strategies." Those that aim more at the underlying causes of what is observed in the labor market today are discussed in the second major section, "Research on Wage Determinants and Wage Discrimination." RESEARCH ON COMPARABLE WORTH AND OTHER WAGE ADJUSTMENT STRATEGIES Social Judgments, Social Judgment Biases, and Job Evaluation Procedures The NRC Committee on Occupational Classification and Analysis concluded that formal job evaluation procedures are a potentially useful tool for identifying and correcting instances of wage discrimination (Treiman and Hartmann, 19811.
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It is in this role that the social sciences can be most useful. Industrial psychologists approach the problem of bias existing in job evaluation systems at the level of measurement, since it is at that level that one can investigate the role that social judgments play in introducing bias into the evaluation of the worth of jobs.4 As discussed below, there are three junctures in the use of job evaluation as a comparable worth strategy at which social judgments can introduce bias: deriving job descnptions, determining a set of compensable factors and the weighting assigned to these factors, and evaluating the worth of jobs with respect to identified compensable factors.
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Compensable Factors and Weighting Although existing quantitative job evaluation systems vary in their details, they tend to share certain basic features. A set of attributes of jobs, called compensable factors, is designated and points are assigned to defined levels of each factor.
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Are the compensable factors commonly used in job evaluation plans more relevant for men 's jobs than for those of women, so that men's jobs tend to be more favorably rated? Evaluation' of Jobs With Respect to Compensable Factors Evaluating the worth of jobs with respect to compensable factors is the final stage of the job evaluation process, and it too is subject to social judgment biases.
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More generally, we need studies of the overall effectiveness of reformed job evaluation plans: How effective are venous improvements in job evaluation systems in making them more useful tools in comparable worth cases? The effects of statistical adjustments to correct for the bias in weights based on market wage rates and of improvements in eliminating any gender bias from job descriptions and rating judgments are particular areas for examination.
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. The costs and benefits of comparable worth strategies also need to be compared with other equal employment opportunity and affirmative action policies, which have the same end goal of eliminating discrimination from the labor market but attack different parts of the problem and use different means with likely differing consequences.
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Thus, while in the short run there might be dislocations of various kinds, in the long run, as resource reallocation occurred, eliminating wage discrimination would not be expected to cause either inflation or unemployment. There is a serious question, however, about whether comparable worm policies provide a useful means of contributing to the ultimate goal of a discrimination-free labor market or whether other, more established policies, such as enforcement of Title VII, Title IX, and other sections
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This research area encompasses a number of important issues: · Labor market simulations of wage changes of the sort that would result from the implementation of comparable worth strategies could shed light on the likely effects of such changes on employment levels in different occupations and on inflation or other macroeconomic phenomena. Simulations of discrimination-free labor markets, and resulting hypothetical wage rates and levels of employment in various occupations, could be used for comparison.
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This is because they have been forced by determined women to consider more than traditional technical factors in wage determination as they have been told that traditional factors do not truly represent a nondiscriminato~y basis for evaluating the work of employees in cross-occupational comparisons. While job evaluation plans are based on assumptions about rational economic behavior, in establishing pay rates managers must also respond to ongoing social dynamics within organizations (Rosenbaum, in this volume)
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In light of these concerns, there are a number of researchable issues: · How is consensus among groups with different interests reached in identifying compensable factors for job evaluation systems? In defining internal equity?
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Job access One of the major reasons that women tend to earn less on average than men in the same enterprise is that women and men tend to hold different jobs, with women disproportionately concentrated in the low-paying jobs while men are in the high-paying jobs. While it has been recognized for some time that the level of occupational sex segregation in the labor force is high, the full extent of gender segregation within enterprises has not been clear until recent work by Bielby end Baron (1984a, 1984b)
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Do they remain so? · How does sex segregation affect the relative wage rates of men's and women's jobs?
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Such studies would help us better understand how wages are actually set within enterprises. Specifically, we need to know more about the use of formal or informal job evaluation procedures; the ways in which job evaluation results are used in the wage-setting process; the ways market wages are taken into account through surveys and other means; whether, to what extent, and under what circumstances wages are adjusted to reflect market forces; the role of management-labor negotiations in the way wages are set for specific jobs; and, finally, what kinds of seniority rules, shift differentials, and bonuses exist for which kinds of jobs.
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· Are there any strategies used at the organizational level to adjust the internal wage hierarchy produced by existing job evaluation systems to take into account changes in supply and demand or other factors? · Do newly developed job evaluation systems tend to incorporate traditional values?
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Alternatives to the human capital approach focus on demand-side factors, arguing that women do not have equal access to high-paying jobs held disproportionately by men because of unequal access to information, training, or the jobs themselves. Theorists accepting this explanation for the male-female earnings gap stress institutional mechanisms that limit access for example, as we have already noted, job ladders and other intraorgan~za5 It is useful in- discussions of this kind to distinguish between jobs and occupations.
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(For a review of the possible effects of demographic and economic pressures on occupational segregation, see Cain, in this volume; for a general review of what is known about occupational sex segregation, see Reskin and Hartmann, 1985.) Research in this area can help us weigh the relative importance of choice, training and education, limited access, and so on, in the perpetuation of both occupational segregation and the pay gap.
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is needed to assess likely future levels of sex segregation. Specifically, such models should include research on the age structure of the labor force and of occupations, age differences in job and occupational mobility, differences in cohort size, effects of changes in sex composition on occupational wages, training and skill needs, and whether job export and displacement by technology will have differential effects on the pay and employment prospects of men and women.
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Fewer women drop out of the labor force to have children; indeed, among the youngest cohorts of women, practically no dip in labor force participation is observed during the peak childbearing years. To the extent that continuous participation affects occupational mobility, one might expect women's occupational prospects to increase in the future.
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· Do labor force experience, occupational experience, and firm-specific experience differ in their impact on earnings? Can such differences help explain gender differences in earnings?
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Research is needed on how more generalized cultural beliefs are transformed in workplaces and used as guides in determining wage rates and in assigning "appropriate" jobs to men and women and on what employers and workers value about jobs in specific settings. With respect to the first issue, the use of generalized cultural beliefs in workplaces, it would be of interest to know if there are "folk" models that people use to justify setting differential wages for traditionally male and female jobs.
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Historically in the United States it was considered appropriate to pay blacks less than whites and women less than men for doing the same job. Indeed, until passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, such distinctions were often incorporated into law, e.g., lower pay for women being explicitly justified on the grounds that men needed higher pay in order to support their families (Kessler-Harris, 1982; May, 19821.
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and (3) How are competing belief systems reflected in existing job evaluation systems?
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When a firm adopts a specific job evaluation system, it accepts a particular set of values according to which jobs are hierarchically arrayed. Because job evaluation schemes are used in a large, possibly increasing, number of firms, it is important that researchers investigate the belief systems underlying existing job evaluation plans: · Is there general societal consensus regarding which attributes of jobs ought to be compensated and regarding the relative importance of various attributes?
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or new directions (job evaluation methodology, consensus building in the workplace)
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Philadelphia: Temple University Press. National Committee on Pay Equity, Comparable Worth Project, and the National Women's Political Caucus National Committee on Pay Equity, Comparable Worth Project.
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1984a Effect of choice of factors and factor weights job evaluation.
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