Abstract
SCIENTIFIC workers who are bold enough to glance through the two hundred pages of the report of the Asquith Commission on Equal Pay will not find it easy at first to discern its exact bearings on their own activities. A brief chapter on the professions, and the sections on the non-industrial Civil Service and the Post Office in that on the Central Government Service, the chapters on the teaching service and on the local government services other than teaching, are the portions of the factual survey forming Part 1 of the report which obviously closely concern particular categories of men of science. Another chapter in the same part reviews equal pay in the United States of America, in Australia, in France and the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. In Part 2, where the implications of the claim of equal pay for equal work are considered at length, the physiologist and psychologist may find something of interest in the discussion of the natural factors responsible for the prevailing differences in the remuneration of the labour of men and women and of the psychological effects of equal pay, as well as of the effects on the health and efficiency of women as workers. It is, however, on these explanations of the prevailing differences that there is a memorandum of dissent by Dame Anne Loughlin, Dr. Janet Vaughan and Miss L. F. Nettlefold, and there is a further reservation by Lord Justice Asquith, Sir Jasper Ridley and Prof. D. H. Robertson on the question of over-strain.
Article PDF
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
ECONOMIC STATUS OF MEN AND WOMEN IN THE PROFESSIONS. Nature 159, 41–43 (1947). https://doi.org/10.1038/159041a0
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/159041a0