Customer Reviews

Legalizing Gender Inequality: Courts, Markets and Unequal Pay for Women in America (Structural Analysis in the Social Sciences)

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Fascinating reading, darkly hilarious in spots and an important challenge to orthodox labor economics and law--both of which assume that people's pay is set in "the market." As the authors point out, employers defending discrimination suits don't even have to prove this--it's just an assumption of the system. But the authors show that employers only encounter that "market" through intermediaries, the consultants and advisers who tell them what people are paid--and those people have their own biases, interests, and agendas. The authors carefully examine the records in some famous discrimination cases and show how unlikely it was that any "market" required that the maintenance men be paid more than the secretaries. Every labor economist and lawyer should read this book.

This book makes the very important point (based on empirical evidence) that organizational and structural practices can result in pay inequality that becomes attributed to the "market." Further, this becomes "legalized" (or condoned in the american legal system) because the market is reified by judges and thought to be "natural" rather than socially constructed. The authors brilliantly demonstrate how this occurs in 4 organizations. This is why it has won every major award in sociology and law and society.

I read this as a requirement for one of my graduate courses in Sociology and to be perfectly honest, a classroom full of well-educated people, open and willing to take in Nelson and Bridges' ideas could not make heads or tails of it, and that includes our professor! It is certainly bogged down with legal jargon which makes a lot of it very difficult and not very interesting to read. The conclusions were muddled and unclear which makes the reader question what the point was in the first place. Additionally, from a feminist's point of view, I have to draw in to question the motivation of two white males in writing a book about gender inequality in the workplace. Anonymity among social scientists has become an outdated relic of the positivist period and particularly in this case, prompts the reader to question what the writers have to hide.