- Queuing: Women enter jobs that already pay less, either because employers hire them last (in the "labor queue") or because the things women value in a job are "non-pecuniary" (such as career intermittence, or a love of cleaning).
- Devaluation: The pay in jobs that women hold is lower because women hold them. "Women's work" is valued less either because there is a cultural bias resulting from women's lower social status, because it's similar to unpaid work that many women do for "free" (like childcare), or because women are politically weaker and employers take advantage of it.
One thing devaluation does is create a struggle to define jobs as not women's work. A nice new analysis of that struggle, by Rachel Sherman, appears in Work & Occupations. She shows the creative ways that "personal concierges" -- most of whom are women -- try to sell their services without revealing that they are essentially trying to get paid for doing women's work (to oversimplify the story).
Note this doesn't mean devaluation is why women get paid less overall. This can also happen for other reasons, including wage discrimination within jobs. But the conclusion is important, because devaluation is much harder to sue for under current law, which requires individual acts of discrimination either in hiring (the labor queue) or wage setting (within-job pay) -- both of which are hard to document.
Cross posted from the Family Inequality blog.
