In the labor market and workplace, anti-discrimination rules, affirmative action policies, and pay equity procedures exercise a direct effect on gender relations. But what can be done to influence the ways that men and women allocate tasks and responsibilities at home? In Gender Equality, Volume VI in the Real Utopias series, social scientists Janet C. Gornick and Marcia K. Meyers propose a set of policies--paid family leave provisions, working time regulations, and early childhood education and care--designed to foster more egalitarian family divisions of labor by strengthening men's ties at home and women's attachment to paid work. Their policy proposal is followed by a series of commentaries--both critical and supportive--from a group of distinguished scholars, and a concluding essay in which Gornick and Meyers respond to a debate that is a timely and valuable contribution to egalitarian politics.

Comparable worth--equal pay for jobs of equal value--has been called the civil rights issue of the 1980s. This volume consists of a committee report that sets forth an agenda of much-needed research on this issue, supported by six papers contributed by eminent social scientists. The research agenda presented is structured around two general themes: (1) occupational wage differentials and discrimination and (2) wage adjustment strategies and their impact. The papers deal with a wide range of topics, including job evaluation, social judgment biases in comparable worth analysis, the economics of comparable worth, and prospects for pay equity.