The principle of equal pay for women and men is one of the most crucial issues for gender equality in employment, as pay disparities between women and men have remained one of the most persistent forms of inequality between the genders.

This book considers how the principled idea of equal pay gradually developed and became an international norm, Equal Remuneration Convention No. 100 of the ILO, and how it was connected to different policy discourses at the international level between 1848 and 2000. In addition, the book considers how the Convention was implemented in the specific institutional contexts of nine different countries - Australia, Canada, Finland, Ghana, India, New Zealand, the Philippines, the United Kingdom and Zambia - at different times. The countries are compared in order to discover similarities and differences in the implementation of the Convention across and within the countries.

The study complies with the traditions of historical and concrete document-based social research with particular adherence to the rules of qualitative research. The study is extensive as it combines the international and national level policies on equal pay and covers over 150 years. The study advances a new understanding of equal pay, disclosing different policy interpretations of equal pay as well as the different forms and extents of its implementation, and elaborates new theoretical concepts and classifications, such as the model of gender contracts in equal pay.