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How useful is the procedure used to identify work of equal value between the jobs of men and women?

In July 1982 the European Court of Justice ruled that the United Kingdom's Equal Pay Act infringes Directive 75/117 of the European Economic Community, which provides for equal pay for men and women where the same work, or work of an equal value is being performed. The ruling of the European Court has necessitated changes to the Equal Pay Act in order to give effect to the principle of “equal value” and attention has focused, therefore, on how to give the concept practical expression. To date, the most commonly used method of measuring value is job evaluation, which is said to measure the demands a job makes on a worker. This raises the question as to whether a job evaluation scheme in itself, is an effective instrument for ensuring equality of treatment in assessing the value of men's and women's jobs.

While there is a general awareness that the proportion of women in the workforce is gradually rising, some of the features of this increase in female employment are less well understood. For example, between 1951 and 1971 the proportion of women workers in the labour force rose from 34.7 to 43.0 per cent. However, this increase masks an important change in the composition of the female workforce. In the same period the percentage of married women in the female workforce rose from 38.2 to 63.1 per cent. This growth of married women within the workforce has been paralleled by a growth in part‐time work. In fact, since the early 1960s most of the increase in the number of women entering employment has been due to a growth in part‐time rather than full‐time employees.

The librarian and researcher have to be able to uncover specific articles in their areas of interest. This Bibliography is designed to help. Volume IV, like Volume III, contains features to help the reader to retrieve relevant literature from MCB University Press' considerable output. Each entry within has been indexed according to author(s) and the Fifth Edition of the SCIMP/SCAMP Thesaurus. The latter thus provides a full subject index to facilitate rapid retrieval. Each article or book is assigned its own unique number and this is used in both the subject and author index. This Volume indexes 29 journals indicating the depth, coverage and expansion of MCB's portfolio.

In the March issue, John Wellens reviewed Roberts, White and Parker's study of THE CHARACTER‐TRAINING INDUSTRY. One of the statements in the book with which issue may be taken was that course organisers ‘proved rather ambivalent about having their schemes assessed by outsiders.’ In the first part of the following article, Peter Whitfield, a recent graduate from the MA course in Organisational Psychology at the University of Lancaster, presents some of the findings of just such an outside assessment of the Brathay Hall Month Course which was initiated at Brathay's request in 1973. The main findings of this specific assessment are at variance in many instances with the general conclusions drawn by the Roberts team, and a more detailed report is being prepared for publication elsewhere. In the second part, Chris Graham, Brathay's Development Tutor, reviews key issues determining current and future developments at the centre in the light of Peter Whitfield's work and in the context of Roberts, White and Parker's conclusions.

The Spring 1984 issue of Public Personnel Management includes an article by Joy Ann Grune and Nancy Reder entitled “Addendum — Pay Equity: An Innovative Public Policy Approach to Eliminating Sex‐Based Wage Discrimination”. The authors are both members of the National Committee on Pay Equity, founded in 1979. The article explains the goals of the National Committee, the extent of the problem, reviews the new approaches and solutions in place or underway, and looks at the challenges facing public policymakers and advocates of pay equity.

“The dark” has long been associated with women. An attempt is made here to show how the “dark” can be seen as a valuable and significant concept for women understanding themselves as women and their situation for developing a view towards the concept of “power”. Women, as women, have a responsibility to themselves and others to make their voices heard and to become aware of their particular strengths and to develop these strengths both inside and outside existing organisations. Most current organisations are “male‐dominated” and “male” in approach. Both men and women are frequently unaware of the extent to which they are influenced and operating from a gender‐specific approach. Men and women can equally shape their organisations when women reclaim their strengths and refuse their position as a less important, less informed, “minority” status. The issues of conflict and trust in organisations and problem areas in relationships between women are explored.

Employment Characteristics of Older Women. This is the title of an article by Diane E. Herz in the September 1988 issue of Monthly Labor Review. It examines the employment characteristics of older women in America in 1987.