Book Reviews
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8543.1986.tb00696.x |
| Published date | 01 November 1986 |
| Date | 01 November 1986 |
British Journal
of
Industrial Relations
24:3
November
1986
0007-1080 $3.00
BOOK
REVIEWS
Women and Equal Pay: The Effects
of
Legislation on Female Employment and Wages
in
Britain,
by A. Zabalza and
Z.
Tzannatos. Cambridge University Press, 1985,
140 pp., f19.50.
The work of Zabalza and his collaborators concerning the impact of anti-
discrimination legislation on female pay and employment in Britain is now probably
familiar to most people with an interest
in
the area, their papers having been
published
in
a number
of
journals, includingthe
BJIR.
Nevertheless, it is useful to
have their results collected
in
this book, which will become the basic reference for
anyone interested in the econometric evidence
on
this issue.
Zabalza and Tzannatos’s analysis essentially divides into three parts. First, is the
rise in female average earnings relative to male average earnings
in
the mid-1970s
attributable to a rise in female rates of pay relative to male? Second, are such rises
attributable to the Equal Pay Act 1970 and the Sex Discrimination Act 1975? Third,
how much,
if
any, of a pure discriminatory differential remains to be eliminated,
perhaps by means
of
the so-called ‘equal value’ amendment to the 1970 Act
introduced in 1983?
Their answer to the first question is positive. The rise in female relative earnings
in
the mid-1970s is attributable
to
a once-and-for-all increase
in
rates
of
pay, and not
to
either a change in the distribution of female labour across occupations or a change
in
the pay ranking
of
various occupations differing in their ‘female intensity’. This result
is obtained by decomposing the change in the male-female earnings ratio for broadly
defined occupations and industries into these three effects. My slight reservations
here are that the lack
of
compositional effects may stem from insufficient
disaggregation by the authors, and that the use of New Earnings Survey data to infer
anything useful about the pay and employment
of
part-time workers is highly
suspect. In addition, the discussion of Table
2.6
baffles me. Nevertheless, the overall
conclusion seems robust and an interesting side result, against previous research, is
that the rise in the female-male earnings ratio extends across the whole
of
the
earnings distribution, as well as between the public and private sectors and the
covered and uncovered sectors.
Their answer to the second question is also positive. They calculate that in the
period 1970-1980, female relative wages rose by 19.7 per cent
of
which 18.8 per cent
was due to anti-discriminatory legislation. Incomes policies had a transient, small
and positive effect in 1976 and 1977. The authors obtain this conclusion by estimating
a
reduced form labour demand function, using instrumental variables to get around
the endogeneity
of
both the wage and employment. They argue that their
results are consistent with an upward shift in the labour demand curve for women. In
their chosen specification, male and female labour appear to be very close
substitutes, although other more disaggregated studies of substitution possibilities
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