System format:

--Knowledge required by the job,

--supervisory controls,

--guidelines,

--complexity,

scope and effect of the work,

--personal contacts,

--purpose of contacts,

--physical demands, and

--work environment.

For the universe of almost 4000 completed instruments, a sample of (GS-11 through GS-14) white women's questionnaires were drawn and matched. with white males who were in the same organizational unit, at the same grade with approximately the same time in grade and tenure with GAO. Similarly, a sample of nonwhite men and women was matched with white males again controlling for division, grade, time in grade and time with GAO. The matching was done to rule out the possibility that any differences in quality of experience which might be found could be attributed. to factors which would be expected to impact on an individual's level of responsibility. The sample was restricted to audit staff positions which would be covered by the proposed single agency "Evaluator" series. The demographic characteristics of the samples are shown in Table 1.

Identifying information was purged form the 344 questionnaires and they were sorted to mix grade level, sex and race randomly throughout the group. Position classifiers were asked to review each questionnaire and evaluate the job based on the 9 factor components of CAO's experi- . mental Evaluator Series. The classifiers were told that the task was to

.

test the proposed standard for its applicability and impact on GAO audit

staff positions.

Since the proposed "Evaluator" standard covers substantive (i.e., nonsupervisory) work and most of the GS-13 and 14's are supervisors it is possible that analysis on a factor by factor basis would obscure differences based on supervisory responsibilities exercised. To cover this contingency, the "whole job" was ranked independent from the standard by a group of classifiers and a group of GAO managers. The classifiers partitioned the questionnaires into stacks of 20 based upon an evaluation of the whole job and ordered from the strongest stack of jobs to the weakest stack of jobs. The classifiers then went through each stack and through a method of round-robin comparisons of sets of 5 jobs came up with a whole

job ranking for each questionnaire. A group of GAO managers also ranked the 20 questionnaires in each stack using the round-robin, whole job evaluation method.

RESULTS

The mean number of points for each factor and the mean total points by racial and sex subgroup appear in Tables 2 and 3 respectively. The significance of the differences between the means was tested using a one-way analysis of variance.

Examination of the data in Table 2 reveals that although nonwhites generally received fewer points on most of the factors, the differences were not statistically significant. Likewise the data in Table 3 shows a similar pattern of results with females tending to be credited with an insignificantly lower number of points.