Politics shift. With the Supreme Court, you went from the Lochner era in the 1930s all the way over to the Court in the early 70s with Roe vs. Wade. People who called for the Court to strictly interpret the Constitution shifted along with which way it was getting interpreted.

Some committee that “decides” that a nurse is equivalent to an engineer and a truck driver is equivalent to a waitress may decide something else tomorrow.

And I also think the market is going to shift based on that determination. If mine workers are deemed equivalent to administrative assistants, I would probably do my best to shift over to being an administrative assistant (if I were a mine worker). What do you do if you run out of people who are willing to work as miners? Or garbage collectors, or sewer workers or the rest? They should also have equal opportunity to shift over if there is no extra benefit AT THEIR LEVEL (meaning that’s the most money they can make at their level of education or training or whatever - that’s why they friggin’ do it).

If you want to explain how collective bargaining works in a world of ‘equivalent jobs’ then go for it. As far as I see your dream of having everyone in equivalent jobs getting paid the same won’t work if you allow people to freely join unions which successfully negotiate in the interests of their members. I didn’t think pay differentials between sectors was allowed.

I’ll refrain from calling supporters of pay equity pseudo-leftists (I’ll also pass on saying people are talking insane bullshit), but my point’s still unanswered: I can’t see how you can sign up to both unionism and pay being equalised between sectors.

I would just like to mention that one influence on markets is collective bargaining, and that in the world advocates of ‘equivalent jobs’ would like to bring about this would not be possible. The notion is implacably anti-union.

In the US, pay equity has mainly been used by state governments - which is to say, it has mainly been used among one of the most heavily unionized sectors of the entire labor market.

Please don’t pretend you’re bravely standing up to the market, your position is pseudo-leftist.

I have no patience for smarmy leftier-than-thou rhetoric; and the claim that people who support pay equity aren’t lefties is, frankly, insane. Don’t post that kind of bullshit here again.

Sexism obviously plays a role, but I think there is a confounding factor, which is a legitimate desire for homosociality on the part of many men and women.

Robert, you’re first redefining sexism as “legitimate”, and then pretending that there’s an absence or at least a decline of homosociality in the non-work sphere.

Assuming the market occurs in a vacuum and is driven purely by rational economic forces. Also, there is a Tooth Fairy.

This is simply a misrepresentation, but not one I’m even going to bother arguing with.

I would just like to mention that one influence on markets is collective bargaining, and that in the world advocates of ‘equivalent jobs’ would like to bring about this would not be possible. The notion is implacably anti-union. Please don’t pretend you’re bravely standing up to the market, your position is pseudo-leftist.

Assuming the market occurs in a vacuum and is driven purely by rational economic forces. Also, there is a Tooth Fairy.

Admittedly, advertising influences people, there is corruption (but especially when government money is available, like in defense contracts, grants etc.) and lots of other distortions of the market, but the end result is that for the most part, the market moves to supply people with what they want. Buggy whip manufacturers go bankrupt, computer companies expand. That kind of thing.

Distorting the market may be necessary in some cases (government is necessary), but the more you do it, the more you create opportunities for corruption, misrouting of funds and a black market.

Assuming the market occurs in a vacuum and is driven purely by rational economic forces. Also, there is a Tooth Fairy.

Equivalent jobs are those whose composite of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are equivalent in value, even if the jobs are dissimilar.

It’s just a total rejection of the market. Imagine two jobs, a car driver and a horse drawn carriage driver, if only a dozen people can do the former but thousands can do the latter I think it makes sense to pay more for the former job - even if they’re equivalent. It encourages people to do one rather than the other.

Let’s say that a determination is made that a nurse (RN) in a hospital with 5 years experience is equal to an engineer in a computer company with 5 years experience.

If the nurses get paid less than engineers, you have to either force hospitals to raise the wages, which may be a problem, or you have to force companies to reduce the wages of engineers.

If you do the latter, and if the forced cuts are drastic enough, some engineers are simply going to go somewhere else. Companies may also choose to outsource to get the talent they need, and the outsourcing may also go beyond the border (to India, say, which is already happening).

I suppose you could then implement federal legislation to prohibit any company from outsourcing. Or maybe just build a Berlin Wall.

I think the problem is really in comparing jobs, identifying “equal” tasks is really difficult, especially when its not just the job but the choices within it and the market the job is present in.

What we perhaps need to find is a few studies where only selected industries are compared (so we can ignore the equal job issue) and compare the wages of similar skilled / level workers.

It’s important to note here that wages are based on marginal value, not average value. The question is not how much money child care is worth on average, but how much one more child care worker is worth. There are millions of people who want to buy child care, but not everyone is willing to pay the same amount. Every once in a while, there might be someone willing (in theory) to pay a million dollars an hour. But most people aren’t willing to pay much more than $5-10, and there are probably some people willing to pay only a dollar or so per hour.

The point is that for any given amount of child care being supplied (let’s call it X), consumers will bid up the price until it reaches $Y, the price at which there are exactly X people willing to pay $Y or more for child care. We then say that $Y is the marginal value of child care when X units are supplied, because it’s the price that people are willing to pay for the Xth unit.

That’s the demand side. On the supply side, people are willing to provide child care services for widely varying prices. A billionaire might not be willing to do it for anything less than $500,000 per hour, whereas a teenager might be willing to do it for only $2/hr.

So at any given price, there are W people willing to pay that price or more to consume child care (or whatever), and Z people willing to supply it at that price or less. The market wage is the price at which W and Z are equal, which also happens to be the marginal value of the Zth unit of child care.

The reason child care workers make so little money isn’t that there’s any grand conspiracy to devalue their work, or even necessarily that we individually or collectively value it less than other types of work. The main reason is that it doesn’t require a lot of training, so there’s a virtually endless supply of people who are willing and able to do it. Naturally, this means that the marginal value of an additional child care worker is low, so wages are low as well.

The area of work where the standard left feminist analysis of male-oppression-did-it seems most on target is the area of the trades - skilled and difficult work, generally highly paid, which women do in only small numbers. Why is that?

One answer, inarguably, appears to be “because men conspire to keep them out”. The litany of cases where men on job sites have actively been shitty to new female workers - far beyond the ordinary level of hazing and razzing of newbies - is simply overwhelming. Any woman who has worked in the trades has stories to tell.

Is that a case of simple sexism? Sexism obviously plays a role, but I think there is a confounding factor, which is a legitimate desire for homosociality on the part of many men and women.

Not everybody, but most people, enjoy the company of their own sex on an exclusive basis from time to time. This has less to do with the politics of gender or whatever than it does with the fact that when no members of the opposite sex are in a social space, the social and linguistic constructs that we employ, as a species, as part of the mating game drop out of the active social matrix. That in turn creates a vastly more relaxed and uncompetitive atmosphere - the competitive games still go on, but there are no stakes and people are playing for fun, in essence. That makes for a more congenial atmosphere. Drop a person of the other sex into the mix, and it’s not a homosocial club anymore.

I recall applying for a job in the records department at the courthouse here in Colorado Springs, where all the people working in this office were women. For the interview process, they had the whole department (about ten women) interviewing each candidate. It was extremely clear that the social environment of the office was close, intimate, and mutually supportive and friendly - the benefits of homosociality. It was clear that the interviewing team was very interested in how well the new hire would fit into this existing matrix - and clear that a woman would have a large advantage in appearing compatible.

That’s obviously problematic from a diversity and fairness perspective. On the other hand, how can I blame them? A huge chunk of their enjoyment of their job - and thus of their life - would be wiped out if they started adding men into the mix. The same is true of all-male sites. That doesn’t justify treating people badly whose only crime is having the wrong kind of hooha, of course - but I believe it does explain the motive behind at least some of the bad treatment.

I believe that one productive path to erasing some of this discriminatory behavior would be to legitimize homosociality in non-work contexts. If people can get their dose of relaxed, God-isn’t-it-nice-to-be-just-us-girls/guys social interaction outside the workplace, then their protective reactions in the workplace might be attenuated. We can’t really tolerate coercive homosociality in the workplace - but we can readily tolerate it in the private sphere of action.

Doing so might lower the barriers in the workplace that (mostly) men create, which in turn would bring more women into these high-paying jobs, which in turn would undermine pay inequities.

I’ve heard that this is mainly a problem in unionized industries. Theoretically, it makes sense. The purpose of unions is to drive up wages by limiting the supply of workers available to do a particular kind of work, so they have to find some way to make sure that not everybody who’s willing and able to work in their field actually does so. Driving out women through sexual harassment is one way of achieving this.

You won’t find any of that in the world of software engineering. Heck, I’d happily take a 10% pay cut if it meant having more female coworkers. Purely in the interest of fostering diversity, of course.

That’s because they determined that “web coder” and “child care worker” were equivalent jobs deserving the same pay, and all their techies decided it would be more fun to play with kids all day than write code.

Most large firms already use these sort of evaluations to help them determine pay scales

I have been involved in hiring people at large firms. They determined what wages to pay on the basis of what the average pay for the position that they had open was paid in the area; i.e., what the local market was for that job. Nobody has ever said anything about looking at any other kind of guidelines..

And if you want your company to be competitive, then that’s what you’ll pay, too, and not what some government functionary decides you should pay. Otherwise, your product/service will cost more than what someone who’s not subject to government interference has to pay.

the proposal is to use these already-established procedures to identify and address inequalities in female/male and white/non-white dominated jobs.

How is this going to work? Let’s say that I own a restaurant, and I have a bunch of waitresses. Is some government official going to tell me, “Waitressing is as hard as truck driving, so from now on you have to pay your waitresses twice what you pay them now”? That means prices go up, my business goes down, and I’ll probably end up at the least making less money and having fewer waitressing jobs, and possibly simply going out of business.

The market discriminates on the basis of making money. People whose labor is worth less, either directly or because of associated costs, are going to get paid less than people whose labor is worth more. Note that I’m not talking about the intrinsic worth of the labor, or even the person themselves. Otherwise, a professional athlete or some rap star would get paid 1/200th of what they get and a good elementary school teacher would get paid $100,000/year.

But a corporation/small business is not a social agency. When you take money from them to subsidize social policy, you inevitably hurt their productivity and profitability. This can drive small businesses right out of business and can make larger businesses less competitive. And as you may have noticed, the world most large businesses work in (and a great many small businesses) doesn’t stop at the American borders.

Which leads to another question. If this system has the power to raise someone’s pay, does it have the power to lower someone else’s? If not, why not?

I can’t get the Pay Equity web site to load.

Why, the people who are in charge who obviously are wiser than we and have not only the right, but the obligation, to overrule those of us who “discriminate” and are obviously in the wrong.

The committees put in place to determine which “female” jobs were comparable to which “male” jobs couldn’t come to anything more than a rudimentary determination even after years and couldn’t catalog all of the thousands of positions. In cases where there was an implementation, organizations had to take roundabout measures to even function, for instance the number of applicants for information technology jobs went to nearly zero, but they were flooded with applicants for clerical positions. So the organizations had to simply outsource the IT jobs - at a much higher cost to taxpayers, and the IT people got paid more anyway because of that.

Government micromanagement doesn’t seem to work very well, examples abound from the old Soviet Union, the East Block, North Korea, Cuba etc.

There is some evidence of a “block-busting”-like phenomenon related to the gender segregation of work. When women are admitted, men get out and the field become s less prestigious and lower paid–teaching is a good example.

Second, lots of anthropology and history has suggested that ’skill’ is an near-arbitrary and gender and race-biased category. EG, skilled work is anything mostly white men do. The reasons for this are complex (this isn’t meant as a blameing -type observation.)

I think these are important when considering the relative “value’ of various occupations. Its easy to fall into cognitive traps there.