ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes the scale of disparities in the earnings of men and women in the USSR and, in so far as the available statistics permit it, to trace their evolution through time. It examines Soviet attitudes towards the differentiation of earnings and suggest that it is based on principles that may be inconsistent with sexual equality in earnings. Soviet economists, then, start from the proposition that under socialism as under capitalism individuals are unequal - they are unequal in their capacity for work, in their skills and abilities, in their needs, tastes and preferences; they should be unequal in their incomes. Soviet labour economists and policy-makers, both in the past and at present, believe that such a demonstration is impossible. The tendency towards occupational segregation that may result in part from the non-differentiation of norms facilitates the third feature of the wage imputation process giving rise to sexual inequality in earnings.
