In 1971, two American Federation of State, County, Municipal Employees (AFSCME) 1695 clerical workers at UC Berkeley published a two-page spread in the campus newspaper titled “Fed Up: Secretaries in Academia.” An early, important feminist analysis of clerical work that was disseminated across the country, their manifesto demanded respect for the feminized work that kept university departments running and called for secretaries to come together to foment change—predating more well-known feminist organizations such as Boston 9to5. The Local 1695’s campaign illustrates two diverging strategies for feminist labor activism over the last few decades: calling for “equal pay for equal work” or revaluing “women’s work” through a comparable worth approach.
AFSCME Local 1695’s campaign was part of a revitalized labor movement that increasingly attracted women and a feminist movement focused on sex discrimination in employment. New federal legislation such as Title VII, the anti-discrimination provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, allowed working women to reformulate their grievances in the “new” language of sex discrimination. President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1967 amended Executive Order (which included women in affirmative action), opened new possibilities for women working in higher education. In legal arguments, women professors drew upon affirmative action to argue that they faced sex discrimination; they were not paid the same as their male colleagues in the same jobs, or they were excluded from professorships altogether. Female secretaries made a different argument about sex discrimination. They were paid less simply because they were women in a low-paying, feminized occupation and men in jobs with comparable skills were paid more simply because they were men in male-dominated occupations.
Whereas women faculty would make an “equal pay for equal work” argument, secretaries would make a comparable worth argument. The latter strategy called for “pay equity” between women in feminized jobs with men in male-dominated occupations who had comparable levels of education and skill.
At UC Berkeley, women’s faculty and clerical workers organized separate campaigns. The League of Academic Women, an activist faculty group, filed a grievance for sex discrimination against UC Berkeley with the San Francisco Office of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW); the HEW investigation concluded that UC Berkeley was “not compliant” with federal policy and ordered the institution to follow an affirmative action plan for women. Faculty hiring shifted from recruitment through the old male-buddy network to open advertisements of positions and the monitoring of availability statistics, hiring targets, and progress. Until this time, open advertising was not required by law.
Meanwhile, clerical workers in Local 1695 rallied against sex discrimination by adopting the slogan “equal pay for equivalent work.” Local 1695 was not asking that men and women be paid the same in the same job; their demand called for the transformation of the historical and unequal valuation of the gendered division of labor. After many delays by the university, AFSCME 1695’s case went to arbitration in March 1974, where the arbiter ruled that sex discrimination was not intentional because the university was simply “following the wage standards of society.” Put another way, Berkeley could not be faulted for paying women a lower wage than men in jobs with comparable skills and education because the unequal outcome between the wages in women’s and men’s jobs was simply the status quo. Berkeley’s secretaries understood the historical devaluation of women’s work as stemming from earlier case law and cultural norms that deemed women weaker and destined for their “natural” role as wives and mothers.
The secretaries’ loss shows how affirmative action ultimately benefited professional women in male-dominated occupations, but not women in feminized jobs.
Subsequent affirmative action policies, such as Nixon’s Revised Order No. 4 (1972), compelled employers to conduct audits of their workforce and to promote women in male-dominated occupations. As historian Allison Elias has shown, this Order simultaneously created opportunities for professional women seeking to enter male-dominated occupations and disadvantaged secretaries. In fact, white professional women have been the greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action despite right-wing rhetoric about “undeserving racial minorities.”
The Demise of Comparable Worth
In the 1980s, advocates fought for comparable worth legislation to improve wages in feminized occupations. By conducting job evaluation studies, advocates were able to demonstrate that women in feminized occupations, with similar qualifications and skills to men in male-dominated occupations, were making less money. There were early successes in states like California and Washington for women in state and local government jobs, but opposition followed quickly. Clarence Pendleton, the chair of the Commission on Civil Rights, described it as an attempt “to restructure our free enterprise system into a state-controlled economy under the guise of fairness.” American business leaders had no interest in paying higher wages to women and created a lobbying group that countered the “fairness for women narrative” with a story about the fairness of “taking money from taxpayers” to give to “undeserving state employees.” In the end, the Reagan administration ended comparable worth at the federal level. Only a handful of states still have comparable worth laws on the books, among them California, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, and Washington.
Why did “equal pay for equal work” succeed, while comparable worth did not?
Some have suggested that the notion of “equal pay for equal work” is more compatible with corporate, meritocratic understandings of capitalist success. A woman who achieves the same goal as a man should be remunerated equally for her work. By contrast, demanding “pay equity” for women in feminized occupations is a radical challenge to the unequal, gendered structure of American workplaces.
Still Fed Up: Occupational Segregation Today
The legacy of the class divide between successful professional women on the one hand and clerical women in jobs with low pay and limited career opportunities on the other continues to this day, including in higher education. Occupational gender segregation, or the concentration of women and men in different jobs, continues to be a distinguishing feature of American workplaces. While the number of women in professional fields has grown since the 1970s, most women continue to work in feminized jobs, such as clerical work, nursing, and elementary school teaching. Today, between 93 and 97 percent of all secretaries are women. At the same time, clerical workers are far more likely to be unionized today than secretaries were in the past. In 1993, 40 percent of clerical workers in university settings across the United States were unionized.
While unions like AFSCME and SEIU have given secretaries in higher education substantial leverage in disputes about wages and benefits, pay inequity between men’s and women’s jobs continues. Job evaluations in state and local government jobs have been most successful in demonstrating the disparities between women’s and men’s occupations. Most state legislatures have resisted following their recommendations because it would cost more money to pay women equitably. What policymakers fail to realize is that “pink collar workers,” who make equitable wages (especially single mothers) will be less reliant upon the state for benefits such as Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program – benefits that have been drastically cut thanks to Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Act” (2025). States that invest more in working-class women’s wages will also be investing more in their children and families. A revitalized comparable worth movement could argue contra gender protectionist ideology that working-class women make vital contributions to the economy and to their families. The antiquated belief that women are the “weaker sex” and are destined solely for motherhood has kept women’s wages artificially low. Comparable worth logic upends this narrative by compelling gender equity in pay across sectors.
