SEX DISCRIMINATION IN WAGES 159 "workers in all the operations they are employed10 even though the existence of monopsonistic conditions in the market for farm workers is not so easy to establish. Also in India female farm workers are discriminated against in terms not only of wages but. also of the quantum of employment 1'. On the basis of the received doctrine it is difficult to relate economic theory so far to the existence of the type of almost all-pervasive sex discrmination in wages in what may be considered as the least of skill-intensive work, namely farm labour in India. The moment one introduces the concept of skill, while one may not be in a position easily to dismiss differences in productivity, one really has to go behind these differences and ask how these evolved ovei\ a long period that women were deliberately denied the opportunities to imbibe or learn the skills. The question we shall then be facing is how can these sex differences in productivity based on differences in skills be explained? But, is there any justification for paying women less even for jobs where there is no basis to claim male superiority in productivity? Economic theory so far seems to have failed us. 1 The term ^ex discrimination^ is used here in a much narrower sense than *sex inequality'. It was, for example, the latter that concerned Engels when he traced the links between family structure, capitalism and female oppression in his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. Later on, Marxists dwelt at length on the link between the confinement of women to household chores and their exploitation. Lenin for instance, laid great store by the necessity "for women to participate in common productive labour^* so that "women will occupy the same position as men/* See his The Emancipation of Women. What we are concerned with in this article is cv^n narrower in that we concentrate on the discrimination against those women who are already in the work force, participatingTii^what Lenin called common productive labour. a Towards Equality, Report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, 1974, chapter V, "Roles, Rights and Opportunities for Economic Participation^'. Also, Report of the National Commission on Labour in India, 1969 and Leela Gulati, "Sex ^ Discrimination in Farm Wages, ^ Economic Times, 16 September 1975. 9 Although I have drawn this distinction between different forms of wage discrimination with a view to clearly indicating the type I am concerned with in this article, this distinction is even otherwise very useful. For instance, in studying attempts at enforcing equal pay for equal work it is important to remember that open wage discrimination can easily be driven underground, to borrow a term from Gcrmainc Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, in the two other forms of wage discrimination mentioned. 4 , V B Karnik, Indian Labour: Problems and Prospects, 1974. In his chapter on "Women ia Industry", Karnik points out that "an argument is always put forward that the work turned out by a woman is not of equal value with that turned out by a man and on that ground lower wages are fixed for women in a number of cases^'. It must be added here that this is not an argument of laymen. F Y Edgeworth felt that men and women were inherently unequal in what he called secondary and tertiary characteristics. These are the tendencies to leave and marry, to be too emotional in crisis and to be less able to handle relationships with men, while working. J R Hicks, now a Nobel laureate in Economics maintains that women are generally paid less than men simply because they are generally considered less efficient due to their