The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

464 Chapter 12

Try to develop your own comparable worth

standards in Do Gender 12.3 to see if you can

identify comparable jobs.

When jobs are comparable, does the pay

gap remain? The statistics in Table 12.2 show

difficulty comes in identifying comparable

work. Some of the factors considered in de-

veloping comparable worth standards are

job activities, responsibilities, environmen-

tal conditions/hazards, knowledge required,

education required, skill involved, and ex-

perience needed. A comparable worth mea-

sure of occupations was developed in the

Netherlands (De Ruijter, Schippers, & Van

Doorne-Huiskes, 2004). Experts who were

job evaluators, vocational advisors, and so-

cial scientists evaluated the education, train-

ing, responsibility, physical and mental effort,

and the cognitive, physical, and social skills

required by a number of jobs. They con-

cluded that differences in occupational worth

accounted for the pay disparity between

male-dominated and female-dominated oc-

cupations. However, they also concluded that

people in female-dominant occupations are

underpaid relative to their worth.

Many of the features of a job used in de-

veloping comparable worth policies are quite

subjective, making it difficult to develop rig-

orous guidelines. In addition, it is difficult to

determine how to weigh each aspect of a job.

Male

Male

Employee

Female

Employee

Clerk

(a)

Female Male Female

5,000

Salary10,000

15,000

20,000

25,000

(^0) Male
Male
Employee
Female
Employee
Editor
(b)
Female Male Female
10,000
20,000
Salary
30,000
40,000
50,000
60,000
0
FIGURE 12.11 Female and male respondents assign higher salaries to clerks (a) who are presumed
to be male than female and to editors (b) who are presumed to be male than female.
Source: Adapted from Alksnis et al. (2008).

DO GENDER 12.3

Development of

Comparable Worth Standards

Identify features of a job you think should

influence the salary of that job. Then, choose

10 jobs, including some that are sex segre-

gated (e.g., truck drivers, nurses). Rate each

of the jobs on the features you have identi-

fied. For example, one feature of a job might

be education required; rate each of the jobs

on this dimension (use a scale such as 1=no

education required; 5=higher education re-

quired). Come up with a score based on your

ratings for each job. In the end, you should

have a rank order of which jobs should be

paid the most and the least. Comment on

how you think your rank order fits with the

real-world salaries of those jobs.

M12_HELG0185_04_SE_C12.indd 464 6/21/11 4:23 PM