Fixing Women's Wages: The Effectiveness of Comparable Worth Policies

Abstract

The author discusses some problems that can prevent comparable worth legislation from achieving meaningful gender wage equity, which she defines as the elimination of gender as a factor in wage setting. She then tests the comparable worth policies of two Canadian provinces against the same set of job content data from a 1988 survey of health care workers. Whereas Manitoba's comparable worth policy, she finds, would achieve gender wage equity if applied to this set of jobs, Ontario's would not, and would even result in new and capricious instances of inequity. She argues that continual scrutiny, including comparative analysis, of comparable worth policies is needed not only in order to identify the most effective policy designs, but also to guard against efforts to undercut legislation through manipulation of implementation procedures.