Suchergebnisse

The Equal Value Amendment. At long last the first cases under the equal value amendment to the U.K. Equal Pay Act have made it through the legal minefield to the House of Lords. Unfortunately, however, employers have not liked their lordships' pronouncements and the CBI is now lobbying for legislative changes. In the October issue of Personnel Management Lorraine Paddison explains the latest decisions and confirms that there is indeed no room for complacency.

Women Managers in Japan In the Spring 1988 issue of the California Management Review is an article on "Hiring Women Managers in Japan: An Alternative for Foreign Employers" by Paul Lansing and Kathryn Ready. The authors argue that there is an increasing pool of college‐educated women in Japan who, if given the opportunity, are prepared to take on managerial positions in Japanese business. Due to the difficulties foreign firms face in hiring Japanese male graduates in Japan, it seems appropriate that foreign firms seriously consider a managerial strategy to encourage qualified female employees as a means of obtaining local managers in Japan. The legal environment has created a labour force that is ripe for change. Innovative firms stand to gain by taking actions to accord women equal opportunities in recruitment, hiring and promotion. This extends beyond the "make efforts" dictum of the new Equal Employment Opportunity law. While this strategy is not without risk, the potential return seems to the authors to be well worth the risk.

Meetings NOWME meetings in 1988 The UK's National Organisation for Women's Management Education (NOWME) has devised a programme of meetings for 1988. The venue is The Industrial Society, Carlton House Terrace, London SW1:

Comparable Worth Volume 108 Number 12 of Monthly Labor Review contains four articles on the above theme. The first, by Janet L. Nor‐wood, is entitled "Perspectives on comparable worth: an introduction to the data" and discusses reports presented to a national conference of statisticians. These reports point up the many facets of the comparable worth issue and suggest directions for conducting future research. In the second article, "Comparable worth: how do we know it will work", Carolyn Shaw Bell argues that the debate over comparable worth obscures the lack of consensus on the definition and goals of such a policy, and of the data requi‐red for informed decision‐making. Thirdly, Karen Shall‐cross Koziara explores in "Comparable worth: or‐ganizational dilemmas" the political, economic, and social implications of comparable worth for public and private employers and trade unions. Finally, Sandra E. Gleason argues in "Comparable worth: some questions still un‐answered" that we know the issues surrounding and groups most likely to be affected by a national policy on compar‐able worth, but we cannot quantify possible costs and bene‐fits.

Volume 19 Number 3 of Sociology contains two articles of interest. In the first, entitled "Integrating Women into Class Theory", Angela Dale, G. Nigel Gilbert and Sara Arber propose a theoretical framework by which women as well as men may be included in class theory, and a methodology is suggested by which one aspect of women's class location, their relationship to the labour market, may be measured. It is argued that social class in a Weberian sense may be seen as comprising two distinct although related dimensions. Firstly, that based upon relationship to the labour market, measured at the level of the individual; and second, that represented by patterns of consumption (in terms of goods and services), measured at the level of the family. All those with a direct relationship to the labour market may be allocated to an occupational class position, irrespective of position within the family. Data from the General Household Survey are used to produce a preliminary occupational class schema for women which does not depend upon assumptions of skill or the manual/non‐manual nature of the work.

The Directory of Selected Women's Research and Policy Centers deals with activities and research directions of 28 centres. The 24 page directory discusses current and recently completed research projects. They are organised by centre and by subject. For a copy send $4 to WREI, 204 Fourth Street SE, Washington, DC 20003, USA.

28 December 1981–1 January 1982: Haifa, Israel WOMEN'S WORLDS: THE NEW SCHOLARSHIP An international interdisciplinary congress for academics from all over the world to allow for a dialogue between the various disciplines of the social sciences and humanities and to promote co‐operation and interaction. Further information from The Secretariat, International Interdisciplinary Congress on Women, 122 Hayarkon Street PO Box 3054, Tel Aviv, Israel. Telephone (03) 222217/8 Telex 341132.

Equal pay for men and women was a principle en‐shrined in the Treaty of Rome and was the subject of a European Directive in 1975. This investigation of progress towards equal pay in three member‐states, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom, reveals the importance of differences in employment structures and reward systems in determining relative pay for women. The author argues that differences in the structure and size of pay differentials among countries suggest that more attention needs to be paid to the general system of labour market regulation than to explicit equal‐pay policies. She concludes that women would be more likely to benefit from a strategy of establishing labour standards and regulation than from equal‐pay Directives which have little effect on the general practices and principles of pay determination.