Intrafirm Mobility and Sex Differences in Pay

The authors analyze eleven years of employment data for a regional grocery store chain in the United States that faced a class-action lawsuit over gender discrimination. The data include all employees' job titles, wage rates, and earnings, allowing an examination of initial job assignments, mob...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Industrial & labor relations review 2005-01, Vol.58 (2), p.219-237
Main Authors: Ransom, Michael, Oaxaca, Ronald L.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Affirmative Action
Employees
Employment
Employment Discrimination
Female employees
Grocery stores
Job titles
Judicial Decisions
Labor management relations
Lawsuits
Legal Cases
Litigation
Meats
Men
Occupational mobility
Occupational Segregation
Occupational Status
Seniority
Service Industries
Sex discrimination
Sexual Inequality
Studies
United States
Wages
Wages & salaries
Working Women
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Summary:The authors analyze eleven years of employment data for a regional grocery store chain in the United States that faced a class-action lawsuit over gender discrimination. The data include all employees' job titles, wage rates, and earnings, allowing an examination of initial job assignments, mobility between departments, and mobility into supervisory and management positions. An analysis that models the flows of individuals between different departments and jobs within the firm as a Markov process shows a pattern of intrafirm mobility and initial job assignment that generally penalized women, even when the analysis accounts for individuals' characteristics. Although the court-mandated affirmative action remedies were not formally implemented until after the period of the study, there were clear signs of relative improvement in the economic status of the firm's female employees as a result of the filing of the lawsuit and subsequent trial.
ISSN:0019-7939
2162-271X
DOI:10.1177/001979390505800203