The Case of the State of Oregon (Acker Article)

1. The Case of the State of Oregon (Acker Article) • Struggle for gender equality (comparable worth) • Focus on restructuring job evaluation process • Job evaluation has to do with how kinds of jobs are understood in relation to each other both horizontally and hierarchically • The central accomplishment of job evaluation is the creation of a believable and acceptable system of inequality • The case is about an early 1980s task force for the State of Oregon where women sought to redefine the job evaluation procedures

2. Job Evaluation • Emerged historically before WWII with the rise of the personnel profession • The Hay Guide Chart-Profile Method of Job Evaluation was developed as a way to rationalize jobs and pay scales—focus on the characteristics of jobs, not of the job holder • Acker argues that the Hay approach was a managerialist technology that was used to legitimate managerial authority, and as such, had a bias in favor of managerial tasks and underemphasized many kinds of skills that were used in traditionally female-oriented jobs

3. Hay Job Evaluation Factors • Know-How (60.9%) • - Technical • - Managerial • - Human Relations • Problem-Solving (17.3%) • Accountability (20.4%) • Working Conditions (1.4%) • (Human relations skills, important in many female-dominated jobs, added the smallest number of points to total know-how score)

4. Job Evaluation in Oregon • With the heavy weighting of technical and managerial know-how, male workers (craftspeople, engineers, managers) were advantaged • Hay consultants, of course, disagreed with the claim that their job evaluation approach was gender-biased • This set up a somewhat conflictual negotiation process

5. Job Evaluation in Oregon • Women on the Task Force pushed for an increase in the weighting of the Human Relations portion of know-how—argued that many female jobs involved complex human interaction skills that were not valued by the Hay scale • A minor revision to the Hay scale was negotiated—increasing the number of human relations levels in that scale from 3 to 4 • In the end, the consultants achieved their aims to minimize changes to their system while also reproducing the same job hierarchy

6. Job Evaluation in Oregon • Acker goes on to catalog many other aspects of the process that tended to reproduce hierarchy • A key example has to do with how “training began with the instruction that [job] evaluators would measure the value to the organization of one job class as compared with another along a range from the most complex and most valuable to the least complex and least valuable” (p. 214) • This instruction should bring back vivid memories of your “planet exercise” where you needed to select occupations that would be most valuable to your survival on a new planet

7. Preserving Hierarchy • There was an implicit assumption that a supervisor should have a higher point score that her subordinates even though the supervisor’s technical Know-how might be at the same or even lower level as the supervisee • Differing cultural interpretations (analyzing jobs) • Low-level women’s jobs were called entry level while similar male jobs were apprentice • Women’s jobs were described as simple, routine, repetitive & detailed; men’s were tricky, intricate, broad & strenuous

8. Preserving Hierarchy • Acker highlights perceptual differences based on gender (recall that these are different kinds of status groups) • Acker’s argument is that when a hierarchy involves gender discrimination, reproduction of hierarchy will be highly correlated with continued gender discrimination (not necessarily overt) • In the Oregon case, while the women had a voice in the process of job evaluation, they ultimately failed to make any real progress—Hay consultants and male managers collaborated to reproduce existing hierarchy

9. Lessons from Oregon • A seemingly “technical” analysis of jobs in a bureaucracy provided an opportunity to raise “political” questions about how women’s jobs should be valued • Ultimately, top managers were against such revaluation because they wanted more, not less inequality in the system because they felt that their pay was not keeping pace with pay levels of managers in the private sector • The job evaluation process, therefore, was used as a technical means to reproduce hierarchy—in fact, hierarchical position was used to judge whether the ranking score of a particular job made sense

10. Lessons from Oregon • Hence, the dimension of class (income/hierarchy) are often highly correlated with other status group distinctions (in this case gender) • This leads to the development of gender stereotypes (Kanter) and devaluation of skills and abilities used in female dominated jobs • To the extent that human resource tools and technologies (e.g. job evaluation) are used to reinforce this inequality, they are not merely “neutral” forms of analysis