The structural model of organizations portrays them as rigid hierarchies. It suggests that jobs retain the same value over time, so compensation would not be very responsive to changes in economic circumstances. However, these expectations are put to a severe test in studying the periods included in these data, for they were times of economic and social change: economic stagnation (1962-1965), followed by booming growth (1965-1969), subsequently returning to stagnation (1969-1972), and contraction (1972-1975). Such changes would be expected to be accompanied by changes in priorities among types of jobs. Furthermore, the shift from the traditional job status system to the job evaluation system took place during this period (in 1972). In addition, an affirmative action program began in 1969 and was extended in 1972, which would be expected to change the relative standing of jobs containing large proportions of women and minorities. In the face of these great changes, to what extent were jobs changing in the compensation they offered?
The compensation offered by a job shall be indicated by the average earnings of all individuals who occupy the job at a particular time, and will be called job salary or simply salary. There is a large range of job salaries in this organization, even within a single level of the organizational hierarchy. To what extent are these job salaries stable properties of jobs over these periods of great economic changes?
In order to characterize jobs (and not individual employees), the following analyses are limited only to jobs with five or more employees. Since the lower-management level contains few jobs this size, the remaining analyses in this article only consider non-management and foreman levels.
Demographic Attributes of Jobs
Before analyzing the effects of the human capital composition of jobs on job salaries, it is necessary to consider a more basic issue: whether jobs can be characterized by different amounts of human capital. At issue here is whether the demographic composition of jobs is a stable property of jobs. If, as human capital theory assumes, jobs differ in their human capital requirements; then jobs should have fairly stable demographic composition. For example, if some jobs require more education than others, then it would be expected that a higher percentage of these jobs are held by college graduates and this should be an enduring characteristic of these jobs. Do jobs indeed have stable demographic attributes?
College degrees are one individual attribute on which jobs might be expected to differ in their requirements. For some jobs all employees might be required to have B.A. degrees, while for others mostly employees without degrees would be recruited. If each job is characterized in terms of the percentage of employees with college degrees, considerable variation is found among jobs.
Years of experience in a corporation is another individual characteristic on which jobs might be expected to differ. The tendency might be to select only very experienced employees for some jobs, while only inexperienced employees would be selected for others. The average tenure of job occupants is taken as the index of tenure for each job, and considerable variation is found on this index. When correlations of this index are analyzed over time, for jobs with five or more employees, considerable stability is found .
Female percentage has a strong significant negative relationship with job salaries in all years, even after controlling for human capital composition. In non-management level in 1965, job salaries were $21 less for each additional percentage of females, so that the regression estimates that salaries for 100%-female jobs were $2100 less than salaries for all-male jobs, a figure very close to the real difference between job salaries of all-male and all-female jobs. Although human capital composition accounts for some of the earnings differences among jobs (particularly at the foreman level); even after controlling for this, the salaries for jobs employing a higher percentage of females are lower.
Job Status Effects on Job Salaries
The job status classifications in this organization actually derive from two different systems: a traditional status system which operated until 1971 and a job evaluation system which operated thereafter. However, although job statuses were determined by two different procedures over these periods, the actual status rankings are strikingly similar.
The stability of job statuses between the 1960s and 1970s casts some doubt on the extensiveness of change introduced by job evaluation. Although described in the job evaluation literature and in organization policy as a thorough reevaluation based on more rational criteria, the resulting rankings are only minimally reordered by this system. One must infer that either the traditional system was a great deal more rational than it had been portrayed, or, more likely, traditional values from the previous system have somehow been inadvertently reintroduced into the job evaluation system.r In any case, the stability of the job status categories does suggest that they can be analyzed as if they were the same phenomenon in all years although the organization constructed them by different procedures.
When job status is introduced into the analyses for the foreman level (recall that data are unavailable for analysis of job status categories in non-management), job status is indeed found to have a very great influence on job salaries. Of course, its large influence is not surprising since it is the result of traditional status and job evaluation systems which are supposed to determine job compensation. However, while the basis of job status changed from tradition to job evaluation, job status continues to have the same amount of influence in 1969 and 1972. Contrary to the aim of job evaluation to rationalize compensation and reduce bias; the penalty against female jobs is not reduced, and it is increasingly mediated by the job evaluation system.
Indeed, since nearly all of the influence of female percentage is mediated by job status in 1975, job evaluation may be preserving and legitimating the influence of this factor; and it may be making it less subject to criticism. Job evaluation creates a status hierarchy which continues to mediate much of the effect of female percentage on earnings, in the same way that the traditional status system did. Job evaluation, even in the context of a strong affirmative action program, maintains and possibly reinforces much of the earnings differences among male and female jobs.
Sociological uses of path analysis have a customary practice of treating factors which mediate effects of other factors as not truly causal. Thus in the present analyses the fact that the effects of college degrees on earnings is mediated by job status may be viewed as incidental.
