The correlation of occupational gender composition and wages is the basis of pay equity/comparable worth legislation. A number of previous studies have examined this correlation in US data, identifying some of the determinants of low wages in female jobs, as well as important limitations of...

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive picture, circa the late 1980's, of occupational gender segregation in Canada and its consequences for wages. Our analysis reveals sensitivity of the estimated penalty to female work to both specification and estimation strategy. Our preferred estimates...

We investigate the effect of pro-active comparable worth legislation covering both the public and private sectors on wages, the gender wage gap and the gender composition of employment. The focus is the pay equity initiative of the Canadian province of Ontario in the early 1990s. We document...

In this paper, we investigate the mechanism by which the femaleness of occupations has a negative effect on women's wages. We relate US/Canada differences in labor market institutions, the returns to skills and other dimensions of the wage structure, such as occupational rents, to corresponding...

The Ontario experience with respect to pay equity is evaluated based0501nly on a set of program evaluation citeria. Such criteria are informative in their own right, but they also provide a systematic way of categorizing the issues that are involved in evaluating pay equity in general, with the...

Current anti-poverty policy proposals focus on welfare reform to the exclusion of reforming the low-wage labor market. In contrast, we compare two policy proposals aimed at low-wage labor markets: a national comparable worth policy and an increase in the minimum wage. With both policies we pay...