Just Give Us the Money: A Discussion
of Discrimination and Pay Equity

REVIEW BY SUE FINDLAY

by Debra Lewis
Women's Research Centre,
Vancouver, 1988. 136 pages
$9.00 + $1.50 postage for first copy;
$.75 each additional copy

The development of proposals for change and the strategies to promote them should not be static. Women's issues such as wage discrimination are so pervasive and well-entrenched that they require consistent review of our experience and changes to our strategy based on what we have learned.

I bet there are few feminists who would disagree with the sentiment expressed by the title of this book. We have fought long and hard at the federal and provincial levels of government since the early 1970s for legislation to ensure equal pay for work of equal value. In the 1980s we witnessed and participated in the development of a very specific kind of response to our demands by these governments, namely, pay equity legislation. This legislation is pro-active and is based on comparing the value of female and male jobs within an employer's establishment, a comparison that requires some form of job evaluation.

As we enter the 1990s, we find the impact of this legislation is more limited than we had imagined or intended. Pay equity legislation may be defined as the solution to wage discrimination by governments and the public today, but are we getting the kind of results we want?

Just Give Us the Money is well-timed call for debate about pay equity in the feminist community, about the current legislation, and strategies that might produce more effective policies in the future. Using interviews with 23 women working in unions, governments and feminist advocacy groups in Ontario, Manitoba, Quebec, Ottawa and Minnesota, Debra Lewis illustrates that in spite of a consensus to get more money to more women, there is no consensus on the best way to do it. Pay equity legislation is generating more questions than answers.

A small book in size, Just Give Us the Money ranges wide and deep in its orientation. Lewis begins with a brief overview of the origin and maintenance of wage discrimination through the convergence of capitalist and patriarchal interests up to the introduction of equal pay legislation in the 1950s. From there she moves on to our experience in the 1970s and 1980s to show how these interests shape and limit the impact of pay equity legislation.

In spite of political commitment to end wage discrimination and feminist involvement in the development and implementation of policies to meet these commitments, there has been little substantial change in women's wages. We may be successful in forcing politicians to respond to the needs we have documented, but how they respond is also an issue. Lewis argues we need to move beyond documentation of the problem and "develop an analysis of the issue and a framework through which we can organize for change" (page 28).

The first challenge is to be clear about what we want and how to get it. General definitions ("motherhood" statements) leave the field open to reinterpretation by those who may not share our goals. Lewis suggests that a specific statement of intent might be more relevant than the actual words used to describe the issues. She argues that because pay equity was loosely defined by feminists to cover a wide range of initiatives, it has been easily captured by governments which tend "to translate it into a very specific legislative solution, and say that the solution will address the broader problem that feminists have raised" (page 36).