Equal Pay Policy in Practice I: Promises and Pitfalls of Social Dialogue

Abstract

The goal of this panel is to answer a central question of comparative gender policy studies: what contributes to successful gender equality policy in action? The papers on this panel focus on equal pay policies in democratic countries with employment policy frameworks that emphasize social partners. Each paper maps out how equal pay policies at the national level were implemented and evaluated and whether they allowed for progress in highly entrenched gender-based salary inequities in each country. The common framework followed by all of the papers allows for fine grained analysis of post adoption at the “street level” identifying whether women were empowered in an intersectional way in those processes and whether outcomes were able to move toward more gender transformative outcomes in terms of gender as it is intertwined with other vectors of inequalities, like race, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation and identity.

Title	Details
Can pay transparency help reduce the gender pay gap? Insights into the limited and selective effects of French policy	View Paper Details
It’s a long way to … nowhere? Equal Pay Legislation in Germany	View Paper Details
Change and Stagnancy: The promise of company level pay transparency policies within a collective wage formation system	View Paper Details
Social dialogue and implementing Equal Pay policy in Belgium: Between collective awareness, mixed understandings and structural limits of policy instruments	View Paper Details