ABSTRACT

There are three types of discrimination that can produce wage differences between men and women. (1) Women are differentially allocated to occupations and establishments that pay lower wages. This may involve discrimination partly through differential access to occupations and establishments—that is, the matching process at the point of hire—and partly through subsequent promotions. We call this process allocative discrimination. (2) Occupations held primarily by women are paid lower wages than those held primarily by men, although skill requirements and other wage relevant factors are the same. This process, which we call valuative discrimination, is addressed by comparable worth initiatives. (3) Women receive lower wages than men within a given occupation and establishment. We call this process within-job wage discrimination. Allocative and valuative discrimination involve the segregation of men and women into different occupations, establishments, or both, and may occur without within-job wage discrimination. Thus, although it may be the case that where men and women share the same jobs they receive the same pay, they simply do not share the same jobs all that often. One conjecture currently accepted by many researchers is that wage differences are less an issue of within-job wage discrimination and more a matter of allocative and valuative processes. That is, the segregation of women into lower paying occupations, establishments, or both, and lower pay in occupations held primarily by women are more important than pay differences within the same job in explaining the gender wage gap. Treiman and Hartmann (1981, 92–93) write, “Although the committee recognizes that instances of unequal pay for the same work have not been entirely eliminated, we believe that they are probably not now the major source of differences in earnings.” This conjecture is drawn primarily from a large literature that focuses on pay differences across and within occupations. One pattern of findings is that the wage gap between men and women becomes smaller as occupational controls become finer, suggesting that a large proportion of the wage gap is explained by occupational distribution (Treiman and Hartmann 1981; Reskin and Roos 1990). For example, Treiman and Hartmann (1981, 33–39) explained 10 to 20 percent of the raw gap using 222 occupational categories and 35 to 40 percent using 479 categories. These studies usually draw on data from the Census or national probability samples that allow no analysis of practices in specific establishments. Additional evidence suggests that, 913within occupations, the distribution of women across firms or establishments also accounts for some portion of the wage gap. For example, Blau (1977) found that in 11 clerical occupations, differences in men’s and women’s wages were larger between than within establishments.