An Experimental Study of Job Evaluation and Comparable Worth

The doctrine of comparable worth rests on an assumption that each job possesses an inherent worth independent of the market forces of supply and demand. Implementation of comparable worth further requires that inherent job worth be measured with reasonable accuracy. This paper reports the results of an experimental study of comparable worth. Three commercial job evaluation firms rated the same set of 27 jobs in an actual company. Statistical analysis of the experimental data indicates that the three evaluators differed in which job trait, or constellation of traits, they used to evaluate inherent job worth, implying that at least one of them failed to measure inherent job worth accurately. These results suggest that any attempt to implement comparable worth may be quite sensitive to the evaluator chosen to measure job worth