The 40-year pursuit of equal pay: a case of constantly moving goalposts

Jill Rubery and Damian Grimshaw

Cambridge Journal of Economics, 2015, vol. 39, issue 2, 319-343

Abstract: Progress towards equal pay is elusive. This article reviews debates on and prescribed remedies for gender pay equality over the past 40 years of equal pay policy. It looks at pay from four perspectives—the economic, the sociological, the institutional and the organisational—and explores how and why once an apparent remedy for unequal pay is pursued, the goalposts tend to shift. The argument is made that the difficulties in securing long-term progress may be attributed to a number of factors, including the multifaceted nature of pay as a social phenomenon, the challenge of pursuing social objectives in a rapidly changing and fragmenting environment, the need for political will not technical solutions to achieve redistribution and the potential for gender inequalities to re-emerge in new forms.

Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cje/beu053 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:cambje:v:39:y:2015:i:2:p:319-343.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Cambridge Journal of Economics is currently edited by Jacqui Lagrue

More articles in Cambridge Journal of Economics from Cambridge Political Economy Society Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().