WSW EDITORIAL Volque.4

By Loretta Feller

I suppose that the results of the study on the comparable worth issue released in September by the National Academy of Science may come as a surprise to some people. For those of us who work in jobs traditionally held by women, however, they are daily economic truths. Contracted by the Equal Employ-

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ment Opportunity Commission to examine the standards used to establish pay rates, the $210,000 study found that methods of job analysis and classification currently used perpetuate traditional stereotypes. The study concludes that job segregation by sex is indeed pronounced in this country. It reiterates that women in the late 1970's earned less than 60 percent of what men earned, despite anti-discrimination

Sex Stereotyping Our Children.......

• CONTENTS

Title IX: Rocking the Boat....

..5

Reviews.....

.....7

Letters...

.:.3.

Classified Ads.........

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Find It Fastest........

......back cover

What's Happening..

Cover Photo by Jan McElwain-Bell

News

National and State

Solidarity Day Report..... "Right-to-Life" Convention..

Local

Longest Nurses' Strike in History.....

Striking Ashtabula Nurses Speak... Features

Cervical Cap: A Contraceptive Rediscovered........6

What She Wants

...12-15

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Loretta Feller/Coordinator

Marycatherine Krause/Coordinator

Ruta Gasiunas

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laws. Finally, it asserts that many jobs pay less, at least in part, because they are held mainly by women. So banks who pay their tellers less than they pay their janitors, and hospitals who pay their nurses less than they pay their maintenance men, can no longer excuse themselves. They can no longer blame women for running home to have babies or plead compliance with industry-wide standards and the laws of the labor market. When these factors are filtered out, sexism is still a bottom-line structural bias in compensation systems.

Nevertheless, the question we want answered is not whether racism and sexism are influencing our pay; we could have told them that for less than $210,000. We want to know how to eliminate the effects of discrimination in determining the worth of jobs. After several chapters devoted to the study of still other studies complete with equations such as

Ŷ =

= a + Σb;J; + Σc;X; + dF

the Academy concludes: "At present, we know of no method that would guarantee a fair pay system." Those of us in search of that illusive career opportunity are not impressed.

Scientists, however, cannot be relied upon to make change. When we discuss hierarchies of job worth, we are really concerned with factors which cannot be quantified adequately by scientific methods; in the process of change, it is essential to confront our own human values.

As a nation, our values concerning women and work are changing. When I took my first job operating a lathe at Yoder Clutch, no one, including myself, thought it odd that John Miller, who did the same work I did, should be paid 50° an hour more than I. Now equal pay for equal work is a principle about which most people, conservatives and liberals alike, agree.,

Despite passage of the federal Equal Pay Act in 1963, we are appalled to find in statistics from 15 years later, that the pay gap between men and women has actually widened. The comparable worth theory addresses this discrepancy. To date, the issue has met with mixed success in the courts. Nurses working for the City of Denver claimed that the city's job and pay classification system was discriminatory. They pointed out that nursing service directors, for example, were grouped in a pay class that was 86 percent female (including beginning nurses and dental hygienists) rather than in a pay class held mainly by men (such as directors of environmental health and hospital administrative officers). They argued their case unsuccessfully before the U.S. Court of Appeals.

Prison matrons working for Washington County (see WSW, July/August, 1981), however, did succeed in convincing the U.S. Supreme Court that their wages were intentionally reduced because of their sex. The county had conducted a survey of jobs in which it determined that the women should be paid 95 percent as much as the male officers. Subsequently, the county paid the women only about 70 percent as much while paying the men the full evaluated worth of their jobs (about $200 a month more than the women). It took 71⁄2 years for the matrons to argue their case. Less patient municipal workers in San Jose, California walked off their jobs this summer over a similar discrepancy. A study of their jobs had found (continued on page 2)

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October, 1981/What She Wants/Page 1