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From: cjh@csin.UUCP (Chip Hitchcock)
Newsgroups: net.women
Subject: 59 cents
Message-ID: <331@csin.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Sep-83 13:10:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: csin.331
Posted: Wed Sep 21 13:10:59 1983
Date-Received: Wed, 21-Sep-83 23:53:35 EDT
Lines: 30


   This figure has been around for a while, but the NATIONAL N.O.W. TIMES
claims it is still accurate. In rebuttal to Charlie Kaufman's remarks I will
note the following:
  1. In large organizations (the study I was involved with looked at the Dept.
of Defense) it is common for women to be slotted into career tracks. Jumping
tracks is difficult and generally results in a drop of several grades.
  2. It is a common complaint (frequently backed up with evidence that depends
significantly on interpretation) that available work in many areas is divided
into "men's work" and "women's work", and that comparison of jobs in these
categories that require similar skills/effort/experience/responsibility shows
the "women's work" being recompensed at a much lower level. Shifting between
these categories is even harder than in (1).
  3. There is still a tendency to pay women significantly less than men for
work under the same title. Laws about this vary from strong (e.g. Mass. and
Penna. ERA's) to nonexistent (more frequent). Why don't such companies shift
entirely to female workers? Sheer inertia. (The free market became a
nonsensical fiction many decades ago; one of the things that killed it was the
increasing number of dinosauroid companies that couldn't move with anything
like the quickness Adam Smith describes and so settled for stability instead.)
Workforce turnover can cause all sorts of problems. To be fair, union contracts
in many situations make such turnover difficult.

   So pay differentials reflect job distribution as well as simple unfairness.
So? Are the job distributions fair? Generally not. . . .

	CHip
		(Chip Hitchcock)
		ARPA: CJH@CCA-UNIX
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