BiblioVault - Books about Pay equity

The Declining Significance of Gender?

Francine D. Blau

Russell Sage Foundation, 2006

The last half-century has witnessed substantial change in the opportunities and rewards available to men and women in the workplace. While the gender pay gap narrowed and female labor force participation rose dramatically in recent decades, some dimensions of gender inequality—most notably the division of labor in the family—have been more resistant to change, or have changed more slowly in recent years than in the past. These trends suggest that one of two possible futures could lie ahead: an optimistic scenario in which gender inequalities continue to erode, or a pessimistic scenario where contemporary institutional arrangements persevere and the gender revolution stalls. In The Declining Significance of Gender?, editors Francine Blau, Mary Brinton, and David Grusky bring together top gender scholars in sociology and economics to make sense of the recent changes in gender inequality, and to judge whether the optimistic or pessimistic view better depicts the prospects and bottlenecks that lie ahead. It examines the economic, organizational, political, and cultural forces that have changed the status of women and men in the labor market. The contributors examine the economic assumption that discrimination in hiring is economically inefficient and will be weeded out eventually by market competition. They explore the effect that family-family organizational policies have had in drawing women into the workplace and giving them even footing in the organizational hierarchy. Several chapters ask whether political interventions might reduce or increase gender inequality, and others discuss whether a social ethos favoring egalitarianism is working to overcome generations of discriminatory treatment against women. Although there is much rhetoric about the future of gender inequality, The Declining Significance of Gender? provides a sustained attempt to consider analytically the forces that are shaping the gender revolution. Its wide-ranging analysis of contemporary gender disparities will stimulate readers to think more deeply and in new ways about the extent to which gender remains a major fault line of inequality.

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Doing Comparable Worth

Gender, Class, and Pay Equity

Joan Acker

Temple University Press, 1991

Doing Comparable Worth is the first empirical study of the actual process of attempting to translate into reality the idea of equal pay for work of equal value. This political ethnography documents a large project undertaken by the state of Oregon to evaluate 35,000 jobs of state employees, identify gender-based pay inequities, and remedy these inequities. The book details both the technical and political processes, showing how the technical was always political, how management manipulated and unions resisted wage redistribution, and how initial defeat was turned into partial victory for pay equity by labor union women and women's movement activists.

As a member of the legislative task force that was responsible for implementing the legislation requiring a pay equity study in Oregon, Joan Acker gives an insider's view of how job evaluation, job classification, and the formulation of an equity plan were carried out. She reveals many of the political and technical problems in doing comparable worth that are not evident to outsiders. She also places comparable worth within a feminist theoretical perspective.

In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

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Gendered Places

The Landscape of Local Gender Norms across the United States

William J. Scarborough

Temple University Press, 2023

Every place has its quirky attributes, cultural reputation, and distinctive flair. But when we travel across America, do we also experience distinct gender norms and expectations? In his groundbreaking Gendered Places, William Scarborough examines metropolitan commuting zones to see how each region’s local culture reflects gender roles and gender equity. He uses surveys and social media data to measure multiple dimensions of gender norms, including expectations toward women in leadership, attitudes toward working mothers, as well as the division of household labor.

Gendered Places reveals that different locations, even within the same region of the country, such as Milwaukee and Madison Wisconsin, have distinct gender norms and highly influential cultural environments. Scarboroughshows how these local norms shape the attitudes and behaviors of residents with implications on patterns of inequality such as the gender wage gap. His findings offer valuable insight for community leaders and organizers making efforts to promote equality in their region.

Scarboroughrecognizes local culture as not value-neutral, but highly crucial to the gender structure that perpetuates, or challenges, gender inequality. Gendered Places questions how these gender norms are sustained and their social consequences.

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Job Queues, Gender Queues

Explaining Women's Inroads into Male Occupations

Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos

Temple University Press, 1990

Since 1970, women have made widely publicized gains in several customarily male occupations. Many commentators have understood this apparent integration as an important step to sexual equality in the workplace. Barbara F. Reskin and Patricia A. Roos read a different lesson in the changing gender composition of occupations that were traditionally reserved for men. With persuasive evidence, Job Queues, Gender Queues offers a controversial interpretation of women's dramatic inroads into several male occupations based on case studies of "feminizing" male occupation.

The authors propose and develop a queuing theory of occupations' sex composition. This theory contends that the labor market comprises a "gender queue" with employers preferring male to female workers for most jobs. Workers also rank jobs into a "job queue." As a result, the highest-ranked workers monopolize the most desirable jobs. Reskin and Roos use this queuing perspective to explain why several male occupations opened their doors to women after 1970. The second part of the book provides evidence for this queuing analysis by presenting case studies of the feminization of specific occupations. These include book editor, pharmacist, public relations specialist, bank manager, systems analyst, insurance adjuster, insurance salesperson, real estate salesperson, bartender, baker, and typesetter/compositor.

In the series Women in the Political Economy, edited by Ronnie J. Steinberg.

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Rights at Work

Pay Equity Reform and the Politics of Legal Mobilization

Michael W. McCann

University of Chicago Press, 1994

What role has litigation played in the struggle for equal pay between women and men? In Rights at Work, Michael W. McCann explains how wage discrimination battles have raised public legal consciousness and helped reform activists mobilize working women in the pay equity movement over the past two decades.

Rights at Work explores the political strategies in more than a dozen pay equity struggles since the late 1970s, including battles of state employees in Washington and Connecticut, as well as city employees in San Jose and Los Angeles. Relying on interviews with over 140 union and feminist activists, McCann shows that, even when the courts failed to correct wage discrimination, litigation and other forms of legal advocacy provided reformers with the legal discourse—the understanding of legal rights and their constraints—for defining and advancing their cause.

Rights at Work offers new insight into the relation between law and social change—the ways in which grass roots social movements work within legal rights traditions to promote progressive reform.

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Wage Justice

Comparable Worth and the Paradox of Technocratic Reform

Sara M. Evans and Barbara N. Nelson

University of Chicago Press, 1989

"This pathbreaking study sets forth the history of attempts to implement pay equity and evaluates the hidden costs of achieving equity. With candor and intelligence, the authors clearly detail the political, organizational, and personal consequences of comparable worth reform strategies. Using extensive data from Minnesota, where pay equity has proceeded further than in any other state in the nation, as well as comparative information from other states and localities, the authors expose the crucial initial steps which define public policy.

"A perceptive and judicious analysis of comparable worth."—Wendy Kaminer, New York Times Book Review

"Very well-crafted. . . . Wage Justice has admirably launched the scholarly evaluation of pay equity, revealing the unforeseen complexities of this key feminist public policy innovation."—Maurine Weiner Greenwald, Journal of American History

"An insightful glimpse of the policy process."—Marian Lief Palley, American Political Science Review

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You’re Paid What You’re Worth

And Other Myths of the Modern Economy

Jake Rosenfeld

Harvard University Press, 2020

“This is the book to throw at your human resources director—not literally, of course—when any attempt is being made to bamboozle you about how decisions on pay have been made…It is a closely argued, thoroughly researched treatise on how we got here and how pay could be both fairer and more effective as a reward.”
—Stefan Stern, Financial World

“A flat-out revelation of a book by one of the nation’s top scholars of the labor market…required reading for anyone who cares about the future of work in America.”
—Matthew Desmond, author of Poverty, by America

“Jake Rosenfeld pulls back the curtain on the multifaceted cultural, institutional, and market forces at play in wage-setting. This timely book illuminates the power dynamics and often arbitrary forces that have contributed to the egregious inequality in the U.S. labor market—and then lays out a clear blueprint for progressive change.”
—Thea Lee, President of the Economic Policy Institute

Job performance and where you work play a role in determining pay, but judgments of productivity and value are highly subjective. What makes a lawyer more valuable than a teacher? How do you measure the output of a police officer, a professor, or a reporter? Why, in the past few decades, did CEOs suddenly become hundreds of times more valuable than their employees? The answers lie not in objective criteria but in battles over interests and ideals.

Four dynamics are paramount: power, inertia, mimicry, and demands for equity. Power struggles legitimize pay for particular jobs, and organizational inertia makes that pay seem natural. Mimicry encourages employers to do what their peers are doing. And workers are on the lookout for practices that seem unfair. Jake Rosenfeld shows us how these dynamics play out in real-world settings, drawing on cutting-edge economics and original survey data, with an eye for compelling stories and revealing details.

You’re Paid What You’re Worth gets to the heart of that most basic of social questions: Who gets what and why?

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