The Personal Website of Mark W. Dawson

Equal Pay for Equal Work

Equal pay for equal work is a noble ideal, but as always, the devil is in the details. In this case, the devil is what constitutes equal work. For instance, take the following example of the details.

• Let’s say you have a bricklaying small business with two bricklayer employees. One of them lays 1000 bricks a day while the other lays 800 bricks a day. Should they both be paid the same? (Quantity)
• Again, you have two bricklayers both of which lay 1000 bricks a day. But one of the bricklayers does a better job than the other bricklayer. Should they both be paid the same? (Quality)
• Again, both bricklayers are equal in all respects, but one of them can be a stone mason if the need should arise. Should they both be paid the same? (Versatility)
• Again, both bricklayers are equal in all respects, but one of them is ambitious and is learning to be a stone mason and specialty bricklayer, while the other just wants to lay bricks. Should they both be paid the same? (Potentiality)
• Again, both bricklayers are equal in all respects, but one of them has been employed with you for five years, while the other has been employed by you for one year. Should they both be paid the same? (Loyalty)
• Again, both bricklayers are equal in all respects, but one bricklayer indicates that they ambitious to become something other than a bricklayer in their future, while the other bricklayer seems content to remain a bricklayer. Should one be considered a short-term employee and the other be considered a long-term employee, and should they both be paid the same? (Futures)
• Finally, both bricklayers are equal in all respects, but one bricklayer is a young man and the other bricklayer is a young woman. The young man is expected to be an employee for many years, while the young woman is expected to become a mother, take time off for childbearing, childbirth, and early child raising, and may not return to your employment. Should one be considered a short-term employee and the other be considered a long-term employee, and should they both be paid the same? (Futures)

Now let’s assume that it is not a bricklaying business but a small accounting business with a dozen employees. Do the same criteria of Quantity, Quality, Versatility, Potentiality, Loyalty, and Futures apply to your accounting business employees? In reality, it is a combination of all of these criteria that set the pay scale for employees.

To categorize your pay scale simply between male and female does not do justice to the interrelationships between all the criteria utilized to determine how you pay employees. Circumstances matter when reviewing pay between men and women, and it is not often possible to know all these circumstances when doing a statistical analysis of pay between men and women.

Equal pay for work of equal value is more often utilized by employers when setting the wages for their employees. And value is more subjective than objective and therefore more difficult to quantify for statistical analysis. There have been many studies that attempt to quantify value. While these studies accuracies have points of dispute, they have shown that the wage gap between various groups (male-female, white-black, married-unmarried, educations levels, etc.) are not what they appear to be and in some cases are opposite what the general public perceptions. Therefore, you should be wary of the devil and always be careful with the details when dealing with income disparities claims. It may be helpful to review my Perspective on Statistics and Public Polling article for more information on how to be careful with studies, statistics, and polling.

The example of my wife and daughter is an illuminating story. My wife was an assistant vice president at a bank in which she had important responsibilities which she carried out and a high-quality manner. When she became pregnant she took the last month of her pregnancy off as well as the first six weeks of our daughters’ life. She then went back to work and my mother-in-law took care of our daughter for the first two years. When this became too difficult for my mother-in-law to accomplish we placed our daughter in daycare. After two years in daycare, my wife decided that she wanted to spend more quality time with our daughter and she took a leave of absence for six months, which became much longer due to her father and mother’s ill health. The bank went out of business before my wife could return, but there was a period of about two years in which the bank did not have her services. This absence would surely have impacted her salary in the future. This absence would also have skewed the pay scale if you had simply categorized pay simply based on a male-female criterion. This detail would surely not have been incorporated in any statistical analysis that utilized only job title male-female categorization.

Another example is professional tennis. Men’s tennis competition is based on the best of five sets of play, while woman’s tennis is based on the best of three sets of play. If you have equal pay for equal work does that require that you pay women 3/5 of what you pay a man (quantity)? It is also true that men’s tennis matches draw more of an audience than woman’s tennis matches. Should men’s tennis competitors be paid more than woman competitors as they have a larger audience (value)? Many other sports competitions also have these disparities. Should the pay of man and woman be reflected by these disparities?

There are many such examples that could be utilized to illuminate this topic. The important thing to remember is that the value of an employee to an employer is dependent on many different factors that are interrelated. Therefore, "Equal Pay for Equal Work" is very difficult to determine as what is "Equal Work" is very difficult to establish, and often one employee may be more valuable than another employee even when they are performing "Equal Work".