Sociologists Robert L. Nelson and William P. Bridges maintain that much of this pay gap (at least in larger organizations) reflects organization-level dynamics, not market forces, employers’ pursuit of efficiency, or cultural prejudice. Despite federal anti-discrimination statutes, however, women have had little success in challenging between-job pay disparities in court. The U.S. Supreme Court, in County of Washington v. Gunther (452 U.S. 1961 [1981]), indicated that employers could be held liable for pay disparities if it was demonstrated that those differences resulted from sex discrimination. The lower federal courts, however, limited Gunther’s effects by rarely finding for the plaintiffs in pay equity cases. By the late 1980s, few women brought such suits. In effect, Nelson and Bridges argue, the federal courts have “legalized” inequality by “giving authoritative approval” to employers’ (weakly supported) contentions that between job pay disparities can be explained by demand and supply in labor markets (311).

Clearly, these are provocative claims. Yet, they emerge from careful and systematic analysis. Legalizing Gender Inequality delineates three possible explanations for sex-based pay gaps within organizations: the market, “administered efficiency,” and “organizational inequality” models. The latter two emphasize organizational processes that mediate the influence of markets on employee compensation. While the administered efficiency view holds that pay disparities reflect differences in labor productivity and organization-specific divisions of labor, the inequality model directs attention to organizational “politics” and “reproduction of cultural advantage” (91) as potential sources of wage gaps.

Nelson and Bridges explore how these models fare when applied to actual organizations. The empirical evidence comes primarily from four organizations that were defendants in employment discrimination lawsuits brought by female employees in the 1970s: the state of Washington (AFSCME v. State of Washington), the University of Northern Iowa (Christensen v. Iowa), Sears (EEOC v. Sears), and the pseudonymous Coastal Savings Bank (Glass v. Coastal Bank). This is a promising strategy since gaining access to data on employee compensation and to other internal documents, especially for private for profit organizations, is notoriously difficult. In the cases examined here, considerable information appears in court documents, including job-level data for all four organizations and individual-level data for two of the four. Moreover, each defendant submitted information from market and job evaluation surveys, plaintiffs submitted their own statistical analyses and expert testimony, and in Coastal Bank, individual employees submitted sworn statements about discriminatory practices. The authors supplement these materials with interviews, media reports, and more general information on employee compensation systems.

The result is an empirically rich, analytically rigorous, and methodologically sound study that makes a compelling argument for focusing more scholarly, judicial, and regulatory attention at the organizational and suborganizational levels of analysis. Nelson and Bridges paint nuanced portraits of the four defendant organizations, exploring the similarities and differences in wage inequality processes and outcomes both between the government and for profit sectors and across levels of hierarchy. The authors are careful, too, to apply the competing explanatory models fairly and to acknowledge the contributions of labor markets and administrative rationality in accounting for sex-based wage variation. If anything, their organized inequality model might have received more sustained conceptual discussion. “Organizational politics,” for example, is never explicitly operationalized and, in the interpretation of the cases, sometimes appears to be a residual, catch-all category. At the same time, like most organization theorists (but unlike many political scientists), Nelson and Bridges seem to view “politics” negatively and thus may overlook potentially constructive political dynamics within organizations.

Although some will be concerned about the representativeness of the organizations examined, Nelson and Bridges are careful to explain and justify their case selection, to limit inferences to large organizations in the United States, and to underscore the limitations of the study. Meanwhile, their painstaking statistical analyses (and re-analyses) of compensation data, including efforts to untangle “within-job” and “between-job” pay inequality and to include relevant information from the U.S. Census Bureau, are persuasive. The statistical findings are reinforced by detailed discussion of the processes within the defendants’ compensation systems. Thus, the authors are able to begin to specify the kinds of mechanisms through which pay differences emerge, stabilize, and change. Most important, perhaps, Nelson and Bridges never lose sight of a primary goal: to use the data from the four cases, “not to retry these cases according to the same legal standards the courts invoked,” but to probe the competing explanations of pay gaps in organizations (116).

Legalizing Gender Inequality makes a powerful argument for more theoretical emphasis on the “organizational dimensions of gender inequality” and for “reopening policy debate on pay equity” (310). The latter, of course, may be quite difficult given the work’s unsparing criticisms of federal judges for too often uncritically accepting employers’ “market defenses” and of plaintiffs and comparable worth advocates for relying on macro “tainted market” (i.e., marred by cultural gender prejudices) arguments. Indeed, the “promarket ideology” that Nelson and Bridges contend informs the “dominant discourse on between job gender inequality” (359) that the courts have legitimated and reinforced also would appear to shape the views of most policy makers, organizational elites, and economists. Ultimately, the authors can only hold out the hope that the “rise of new theories of organizational pay practices” (362) will point to more promising antidiscrimination strategies.