Remedying "Unfair Acts": U.S. Pay Equity by Race and Gender

Jane Lapidus and Deborah Figart

Feminist Economics, 1998, vol. 4, issue 3, 7-28

Abstract: Case studies in Canada, Australia, and the U.S. have found that pay equity (or comparable worth) has reduced the gender-based wage gap substantially, and results of research on the gender composition of jobs have been used guiding pay equity implementation. But, in general, the racial composition jobs remains overlooked in the literature and in public policy. We extend previous work on eliminating the wage penalty of employment in female-dominated occupations to estimating the potential effect of adopting comparable worth to alleviate race- as well as gender-based wage discrimination. First we report the negative impact of racial-ethnic and female composition of jobs on pay in the U.S. Correcting for this form of wage discrimination, we find that implementing comparable worth would appreciably narrow the race- and gender-based wage gaps and significantly reduce the percent of workers earning poverty-level wages, especially among women of color. Close to 50 percent of women of color and 40 percent of white women currently earning less than the federal poverty threshold for a family of three would be lifted out of poverty. Second, we show that, in addition to the effects of occupational concentration, being a woman, an African-American, or a worker of Hispanic origin negatively and significantly affects pay. Not every type of wage discrimination is alleviated by a pay equity policy, which is why activists have also supported anti-discrimination and affirmative action policies for women and people of color.

Keywords: Wage Discrimination; Race And Gender; Comparable Worth; Poverty; Occupational Segregation; Pay Equity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/135457098338293 (text/html)
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:taf:femeco:v:4:y:1998:i:3:p:7-28

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/135457098338293

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().