"Comparable Worth, Disparate Impact, and the Market Rate Salary Problem: A Legal Analysis and Statistical Application"

"Comparable worth" represents the concept that men, women, minorities, and whites should receive equal pay for work of equal value to their employer. The concept has grown out of the widely held belief that social and historical factors acting in the marketplace tend to depress the wages of those jobs that have been traditionally held by women and minorities.' Despite seventeen years of legislated equal employment opportunity,2 most women and minorities continue to work in sexually and racially segregated occupations.3 In 1977 the average full-time woman worker in the United States earned only fiftynine cents for every dollar earned by her male counterpart.4 This wage gap, which has remained constant for more than twenty years,5 has been blamed largely on the concentration of women in traditionally female-dominated, low paying jobs.6 A wage gap also exists between white and minority workers,7 which similarly has been attributed to the concentration of minorities in traditionally minority-dominated, low