THE IMPACT OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S ANTIDISCRIMINATION EFFORTS UPON THE EARNINGS AND EMPLOYMENT OF WOMEN: AN INTER-INDUSTRY, INTER-OCCUPATION APPROACH

When Congress enacted Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it declared labor market discrimination to be illegal and, just as importantly, provided the apparatus needed to detect and eliminate that discrimination. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) was created with a mandate to review the behavior of private sector employers, respond to complaints of employees, negotiate settlements, and, if all else failed, recommend Department of Justice prosecution.; With the issuing of Executive Order 11246 in September, 1965, the Office of Federal Contract Compliance (OFCC) was created. OFCC was charged with monitoring the labor market practices of all federal contractors in addition to requiring affirmative action plans of all those contractors employing at least fifty workers while engaged in a federal contract of {dollar}50,000 or more.; This study is an attempt to determine the impact of EEOC and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) (OFCC was later reorganized and renamed) upon labor market discrimination against women by analyzing employment levels and wage rates of male and female workers across major industries and major occupations from 1958 to 1983.; Estimation of the effects of EEOC and OFCCP is accomplished through the use of a two-sector supply and demand model of the labor market in which male and female employment levels and wage rates serve as the dependent variables. Human capital, as well as macroeconomic variables are included with measures of EEOC and OFCCP leverage as explanatory variables.; Several different sets of results have been generated because estimation of both structural and reduced-form equations yielded many estimated coefficients that failed to correspond to theoretical expectations. That set of results yielding the most believable estimated coefficients, a set of weighted occupation regressions including a wage rate-relative- to-human capital variable, shows that the combined impact of EEOC and OFCCP is positive upon both relative female wage rates and employment levels. However, this preferred set of results should be accepted with considerable caution because of the large magnitude of the estimated government coefficients and the lack of confirmation from other sets of results.