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One thought on “Dukes v. Wal-Mart and the Importance of Class Action Lawsuits in Addressing Systemic Sex Discrimination in the Workplace

  1. LuAnn,There are actually reaitlvely few jobs where results’ are easy to measure. Think of something as simple as selling: even there the results don’t depend on just the worker’s skills and effort but also on a) the overall market conditions and b) the local market conditions.Something like medicine or teaching is even more difficult to in terms of measuring results, as they also depend on what the patient/student does.Only in some manual jobs are results easy to attribute to the worker.I very much doubt that men or any other groups have out-resulted’ the others for this very reason: that results in general are not at all easy to measure or to attribute just to one worker’s effort. Besides, women are not a significant labor force component in occupations which require brute force more than any other characteristic, and nobody, to my knowledge, has argued for pay based on comparable worth of the type that you seem to advocate.Most actual experiments on comparable worth payment systems compare two occupations, one largely male and the other one largely female, where the characteristics that are required are about the same. As examples of the characteristics, what’s usually looked at are the education level needed, the skills that need to be acquired and so on. The comparable-worth argument states that if the two occupations demand the same characteristics then they should be paid the same. Results are usually not measurable, but even if they were, it would be hard to compare them across occupations. For example, if one occupation is animal feeders in a zoo and another one is human nutritionists, how would one compare the results?Critics of comparable worth argue that it displaces market forces and exacerbates female crowding in certain occupations by raising their wages. But the validity of this critique depends crucially on how free the labor markets actually are for women, and very little if any research has been done on that.Echidne

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