The authors find that there is no evidence that discrimination dictates occupational choices to any significant degree today. Women often choose certain occupations because they offer the flexibility needed to balance work and family life. In addition, the Ohio AFL-CIO recently announced a campaign to bypass its legislature and place an equal pay measure directly on this fall's ballot.
Comparable worth is an attempt to set wage rates for job categories by administrative method.
Points would be assigned to all jobs, then pay would be equalized for those in supposedly underpaid jobs that also happen to be dominated by women. In addition to encroaching on personal liberty, such a system would be cumbersome and inefficient. Even if market forces could be ignored, determining whether jobs are of equal worth would be a difficult and arbitrary process since assigning point values to jobs is more art than science, and can be influenced by differences of opinion and personal or institutional biases. Equal pay mandates have consequences - and not the desired ones. Comparable worth would be more than a one-time market intervention.