A Liberal Reformer’s Blind Spot: John Bates Clark, Women Teachers, and the “Equal Pay for Equal Work†Debate

This paper analyzes John Bates Clark’s contribution to the “equal pay for equal work†debate on teachers’ salaries in early twentieth-century New York, focusing on the tension between his abstract formulation of marginal productivity theory and his applied arguments. It shows how, while his theoretical framework presupposed homogeneous labor remunerated according to marginal product, Clark’s treatment of educational labor departed from these assumptions by emphasizing opportunity costs, labor supply, and occupational attractiveness. In the 1909 Teachers’ Salary Commission report, he explained gender wage di erentials through women’s restricted access to alternative employment and further justified them through the family wage doctrine. The paper argues that Clark’s intervention marks a shift from a productivity-based account of wages to one accommodating structural inequalities, thereby providing an economic rationale for the persistence of wage discrimination