CAREER LADDERS AND PAY EQUITY VIA INTERNAL LABOR MARKET ADJUSTMENTS: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE NEW YORK AND MARYLAND PUBLIC SECTORS (DISCRIMINATION, WOMEN, UNIONS, WAGES, MOBILITY)

Traditional economic approaches to the sex-based wage differential have overlooked the effect that internal labor markets have on women's employment and earnings. This study argues that the factors behind the pay gap are more complex than the average figures indicate. The gap increases over the life cycle because women are on a lower or different occupational ladder than men, or often do not have access to mobility ladders at all. How then do we promote women into higher-level jobs? How do we create occupational and wage hierarchies in the internal labor market for women? This study answers these questions through a comparison of the career ladder structure for female- versus male-dominated occupations in the public sectors of a strong collective bargaining state, New York, and a state with no comprehensive collective bargaining law, Maryland. The hypothesis is that unions can play a major role in creating ladders and allowing women access to higher-level jobs, as they have done for men. Data are from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission EEO-4 forms for seven aggregated occupations in 1975, 1980, and 1984. Specifically, mobility probability values and mobility probability lines, proxies for the length and strength of a career ladder, are developed to analyze differences by occupation, sex, and state. Numerical, graphical, and econometric analyses demonstrate that: (1) men have significantly better career opportunities than women in both states (expected); (2) the difference in the mobility opportunities between the sexes in the union state is greater than the nonunion state (unexpected), but decreasing over time; yet (3) career opportunities for both men and women in the union state are greater than the nonunion state (expected). It is concluded that unionization benefits women in a two-stage process. In the first stage, absolute economic gains for all employees are made, but the gap between the sexes is intensified. In the second stage, when prior studies demonstrate a shift from a wage to a nonwage emphasis, women can press for strategies such as labor market mobility or job restructuring to narrow the gap between them and their union brothers.