Comparable Worth: Individual, Interpersonal, and Structural Considerations

This paper discusses additional topics in the comparable worth controversy, organized into four broad areas corresponding to the structure of the journal issue. (1) To balance the historical, legal, and economic perspectives presented in Section 1, information is supplied on the views of workers themselves and of organized labor, and reasons are presented for expanding theory and practice to cover racial and ethnic minorities. (2) Concerning social psychological aspects of pay equity, ideas are presented on how equity theory itself may be extended, some relationships between actual and psychological equity, social comparison and other motives for seeking redress, relationships between comparable worth and procedural and distributive justice, and the social context in which judgments of fairness are made. (3) In relation to job evaluation, we address five additional concerns: reliability, agreement with a criterion, content validity, convergence of methods, and the meaning of job worth. (4) Concerning the implementation and implications of comparable worth, cross‐national and intranational comparisons are drawn, and three important strategies in the U.S. are described.