• your gender shouldn't matter, just how you do the job
• today there often isn't a pay gap at the start
• women's pay grows more slowly if they have children
• men's pay grows faster if they have children
• assumption is not entirely gone that men should be paid more because they support a family, but there is much more variation than that
  
• why do women end up in lower paid positions?
• women have tended away from STEM jobs, which are higher paid
  
• jobs like nursing are thought of as women's jobs, jobs that are predominantly women's jobs have lower pay,some jobs get defined as women's jobs in order to pay less
  
• some women are less career oriented and take time off--but sometimes that is because their jobs had such low pay and lack of opportunity for promotion
  
• discrimination in promotion
• assumption that women are more likely to take time off
• expectation that the people that get promoted will work very long hours
• people who are very good a low paid jobs are needed there, reluctance to promote them (and they may not want to be promoted)
• jobs mostly held by women sometimes have few opportunities for promotion
• assumption is that most women will marry and have kids and be less serious about their careers--but what about the others?
  

Equal pay in the British Civil Service:

• government resisted the principle because it would be costly
  
• also created separate job categories for women's work
• jobs defined as temporary didn't earn pensions
  
• women's work was deskilled
• women who worked with office machines were put in a different category, and the work was divided up differently to require less skill
• but the job might require simple but valuable skills or more programming skills than the job category would indicate
  
• assuming women would quit to marry the office machine operator category had only three levels for promotion
• Civil service explicitly arranged their system so that men would never be payed less than women in the same area (no matter their experience) and women would never supervise men
• the Civil Service began working towards equal pay in 1955, but only within job categories, and those had been separated by gender--54% of women were in jobs that explicitly hired only women
  
• Equal Pay Act finally passed in England in 1970 (in the US in 1963)
  

Welfare state:

• National Health Service began in 1948--medical care is free to the patient, paid for from taxes (not quite 20% of the government budget)
• state pension (comparable to Social Security in the US)
  
• at the same time there was a huge national debt left over from the war

Skilled machine work:

• opening the black box?
• computing did not attract men because there was no path for promotion
  

Arguments against equal pay:

• women were not supporting a family (not necessarily true)
• women were absent more (mostly true of women in the lowest paid jobs)
• waste of training because they will quit (but lack of promotion possibilities made them more likely to quit)

equal value/comparable worth