CETA: Is It Equitable for Women?
Abstract
This Note assesses whether the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) equitably allocates its training, employment, occupational, and wage benefits by sex. Two policy issues motivate the research, the first being legal. CETA represents a $9.4 billion federal program. Does it operate in conformity with federal law on nondiscrimination by sex? The second issue is economic. Unrelated females and female family heads and their dependents have much higher poverty rates than their male counterparts: 33 percent versus 7 percent. In families headed by males, 8 percent of the related children under 18 years of age are poor; in families headed by females, 51 percent of such children are poor. Wives' earnings reduced by 40 percent the number of husband-wife families that would have been poor and by a third the number of children who would have resided in poor husband-wife families. These data show the relevance of anti-discrimination laws to federal programs that control training and employment resources. CETA has certain resources to distribute and some discretion about how to distribute them by sex. These opportunities include participation in CETA itself, program assignment, training or experience in traditional male or mixed occupations, CETA wages, and post-CETA placement. How CETA distributes these resources by sex has no automatic equity implications. Equity can be assessed only relative to some standard. The authors use as a standard the informed preferences of eligible participants. To analyze the sex equity of CETA's resource distributions, they used data from the Continuous Longitudinal Manpower Survey (CLMS) for FY76, FY77, and FY78 CETA enrollees. Respondents were sampled from each quarter's CETA enrollees, interviewed in the quarter after their enrollment, and followed for 36 months. They conducted separate analyses for youths and adults but report primarily the adult results. They use results for youths for comparative purposes only.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 1981
- Accession Number
- ADA483804
Entities
People
- Robert M. Bell
- Sue E. Berryman
- Winston K. Chow
Organizations
- United States Department of Labor