Legalizing Gender Inequality

Courts, Markets and Unequal Pay for Women in America

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by Robert L. Nelson and William P. Bridges

Cambridge University Press

Due/Published May 1999, 410 pages, paper

ISBN 0521627508

Equal pay for men and women in the work force suffered a series of defeats in U.S. courts during the 1970s and 1980s and became the object of attack by a conservative administration and conventional economic wisdom. Yet the issue persists, unsolved, and continues to attract scholarly and popular attention. Building upon a new generation of research about institutions and the social construction of the market, the authors of Legalizing Gender Inequality challenge the existing theories of gender-based pay inequality and present a new, more realistic way to analyze the relationship between the market, pay differentials, and the law.