Gendering the varieties of capitalism: A study of occupational segregation by sex in advanced industrial societies

World Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 142-175

  Estévez Abe, Margarita ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

CAPITALISM; EMPLOYMENT; GENDER ISSUE; SKILLED LABOR; SOCIAL SEGREGATION; TRAINING;

EID: 34250651618     PISSN: 00438871     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/wp.2007.0016     Document Type: Article

References (75)

1. Despite the common use of dissimilarity index as a way of capturing degrees of sex segregation, it fails to capture the multifaceted nature of occupational segregation. For discussions on the complexity of sex segregation as a phenomenon and different measurements, see Richard Anker, Gender and Jobs: Sex Segregations of Jobs in the World (Geneva: ILO, 1998);
2. Maria Charles, "Cross-National Variation in Occupational Sex Segregation," American Sociological Review 57 (August 1992);
3. Maria Charles and David Grusky, "Models for Describing the Underlying Structure of Sex Segregation," American Journal of Sociology 100 (January 1995);
4. Catherine Hakim, "Explaining Trends in Occupational Segregation: The Measurement, Causes, and Consequences of the Sexual Division of Labour," European Sociological Review 8 (September 1992);
5. idem, "Refocusing Research on Occupational Segregation: Reply to Watts," European Sociological Review 9 (December 1993);
6. Magnus Nermo, "Models of Cross-National Variation in Occupational Sex Segregation," European Societies 2 (September 2000).
7. Trond Petersen and Laurie Morgan, "Separate and Unequal: Occupation-Establishment Sex Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap," American Journal of Sociology 101 (September 1995);
8. Rachel Rosenfeld and Arnel Kallenberg, "A Cross-National Comparison of the Gender Gap in Income," American Journal of Sociology 96 (July 1990).
9. Blau and Kahn argue that wage inequality causes sex segregation to exacerbate the gender wage gap; see Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn, "The Gender Earnings Gap: Learning from International Comparisons," American Economic Review 82 (May 1992).
10. According to Blau and Kahn, Scandinavian countries demonstrate high levels of occupational sex segregation, but they nonetheless succeed in narrowing the gender wage gap by compressing the overall wage inequality. The relatively narrow gender gap, however, does not mean that Scandinavian men and women have achieved parity. Hobson, for instance, provides an insightful analysis of high levels of economic dependency among Scandinavian women in spite of the high levels of female labor-force participation; see Barbara Hobson, "No Exit, No Voice: Women's Economic Dependency and the Welfare State," Acta Sociologica 33, no. 3 (1990).
11. On the high levels of occupational segregation in Scandinavian countries, see, among others, Helinä Melkas and Richard Anker, Gender Equality and Occupational Segregation in Nordic Labour Markets (Geneva: ILO, 1998);
12. Maria Charles and David Grusky, Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men (Stanford, Calif; Stanford University Press, 2004);
13. Blau and Kahn (fn. 2).
14. Gary Becker, A Treatise on the Family (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981);
15. Jacob Mincer, "On-the-Job Training: Costs, Returns and Some Implications," Journal of Political Economy 70 (October 1962);
16. Jacob Mincer and Solomon Polacheck, "Family Investments in Human Capital: Earnings of Women," Journal of Political Economy 82, supplemental issue (March 1974).
17. Dennis Aigner and Glen Cain, "Statistical Theories of Discrimination in Labor Markets," Industrial and Labor Relations Review 30 (January 1977);
18. Emund Phelps, "The Statistical Theory of Racism and Sexism," American Economic Review 62 (September 1972).
19. Solomon Polachek, "Occupational Self-Selection: A Human Capital Approach to Sex Differences in Occupational Structure," Review of Economics and Statistics 63 (February 1981).
20. Claudia Goldin, "A Pollution Theory of Discrimination: Male and Female Differences in Occupations and Earnings," NBER Working Paper 8985 (2002).
21. See Paula England, "The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation," Journal of Human Resources 17 (Summer 1982);
22. Paula England and Nancy Folbre, "Gender and Economic Sociology," in Neil Smelser and Richard Swedberg, eds., Handbook of Economic Sociology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
23. Ruth Milkman, Gender at Work: The Dynamics of Job Segregation by Sex during World War II (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986);
24. Barbara Reskin and Patricia Roos, Job Queues, Gender Queues: Explaining Women's Inroads into Male Occupations (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990);
25. Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris, Rising Tide: Gender Equality and Cultural Change around the World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
26. Michael Conway, Teresa Pizzamiglio, and Lauren Mount, "Status, Communality and Agency: Implications for Stereotypes of Gender and Other Groups," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71 (July 1996);
27. Sheryl Correll, "Gender and Career Choice Process: The Role of Biased Self-Assessments," American Journal of Sociology 106 (May 2001).
28. Charles and Grusky (fn 3).
29. Ibid., 302.
30. Ibid., 302-3.
31. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Social Foundation of Postindustrial Economics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999);
32. Jytte Klausen, "The Declining Significance of Male Workers: Trade-Union Responses to Changing Labor Markets," in Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks, and John Stephens, eds., Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999);
33. Evelyn Huber and John Stephens, "Partisan Governance, Women's Employment and the Social Democratic Service State," American Sociological Review 65 (June 2000);
34. OECD, Women and Structural Change (Paris: OECD, 1994).
35. Marcia K. Meyers, Janet C. Gornick, and Katherin E. Ross, "Public Childcare, Parental Leave and Employment," in Diane Sainsbury, ed., Gender and Welfare State Regimes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
36. For the effects of public policy on female labor-force participation, see Lane Kenworthy, Jobs with Equality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, forthcoming), chap. 10.
37. Mandel and Semyonov, "A Welfare State Paradox: State Interventions and Women's Employment in 22 Countries," American Journal of Sociology 111 (May 2006).
38. See Peter A. Hall and David Soskice, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), introduction. I differ from other authors in the VOC camp in thinking that long-term relationships between employers and workers also facilitate the accumulation of general skills. While Gary Becker argues that employers do not invest in general skills, for reasons that are discussed in this article, labor markets marked by robust internal labor markets de facto turn general skills into quasi-firm-specific skills in terms of their mobility.
39. For the feminist critique of the welfare state literature, see Ann Shola Orloff, "Gender and Social Rights of Citizenship: State Policies and Gender Relations in Comparative Research, American Sociological Review 58 (June 1993);
40. Mary Daly, "A Matter of Dependency? The Gender Dimension of British Income Maintenance Provision," Sociology 28 (November 1994);
41. Mary Daly and Katherine Rake, Gender and the Weyare State (Cambridge: Polity, 2003);
42. Diane Sainsbury, "Dual Welfare and Sex Segregation of Access to Social Benefits: Income Maintenance Policies in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, and Sweden," Journal of Social Policy 22 (January 1993);
43. Diane Sainsbury, ed., Gendering Reyare States (London: Sage Publications, 1994);
44. Diane Sainsbury, ed., Gender and Welfare State Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
45. This section draws on the insights in Margarita Estévez-Abe, Torben Iversen, and David Soskice, "Social Protection and the Formation of Skills: A Reinterpretation of the Welfare State," in Hall and Soskice (fn. 17).
46. See Estévez-Abe, Iversen, and Soskice (fn. 19);
47. Peter A. Hall and Daniel Gingrich, "Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities in the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Analysis" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 2001);
48. Torben Iversen and David Soskice, "An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences," American Political Science Review 95 (December 2001).
49. Gary Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964).
50. See Acemoglu and Pischke, "Why Do Firms Train? Theory and Evidence," NBER Working Paper no. 5605 (1996);
51. and idem, "The Structure of Wages and Investment in General Training," Journal of Political Economy 107 (June 1999).
52. For a full discussion of policies that protect employers' human capital investments, see Margarita Estévez-Abe, Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
53. Employers who take in apprentices have an interest in making sure that apprentices complete the contract (and in many cases stay on to work for more years). They are thus more likely to take in male apprentices when there are enough male applicants. Apprenticeships are likely to be gender segregating precisely because they involve employer-provided on-the-job training.
54. Comparable occupational data - and gender breakdown - are not always available; for a good account of data problems, see Anker (fn 1).
55. Anker's data do not contain figures for female occupational concentration for Beligum, Denmark, and Ireland. The percentage of women in manufacturing has not been attained for the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland. The percentage of women in the private sector is not available for Australia, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Employment protection legislation index for Luxembourg is not available. Gender attitude variable is not available for Australia, Luxembourg, New Zealand, and Switzerland. Although Anker includes data for Italy on the number of women and men in managerial positions, Italy has been dropped from the analysis in this article because the number of small family-owned companies in Italy seems to have inflated the number of women in managerial positions. This decision was made after consulting economists at the Bank of Italy.
56. UNESCO also offers international educational data of gender breakdown of vocational and general education. Unfortunately, UNESCO provides the gender breakdown for fewer countries (Japan, Austria, Demark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland). UNESCO data also show that there are fewer women on vocational tracks than men. UNESCO, "Secondary Technical and Vocational Education," Statistical Issue (March 1995).
57. UNESCO (fn. 27).
58. German apprenticeship programs have always been extremely gender segregated: when we look at the most popular five programs among men - all of which are craft skills - we find that 98 percent of enrollment is male. Austria is similar. See CEDEFOP, ed., Vocational Training in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berlin: The European Center for the Development of Vocational Training, 1991);
59. CEDEFOP, ed., Vocational Training in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berlin: The European Center for the Development of Vocational Training, 1995);
60. CEDEFOP, ed., Vocational Education and Training in the Republic of Austria (Thessaloniki, Greece: The European Center for the Development of Vocational Training, 1995).
61. For the details of the index, see Giuseppe Nicoletti, Stefano Scarpette, and Olivier Boylanud, "Summary Indicators of Product Market Regulation with an Extension to Employment Protection Legislation," OECD Economic Department Working Paper no. 18 (1999).
62. It converts the number of paid leave days into fully paid days. Meyers, Gornick, and Ross have devised an index to measure the mother friendliness of welfare states. I do not use it here because it is a composite index that lumps together policies that reduce women's time-off work (that is, public child care provision) and policies that financially compensate for their time off (that is, paid maternity and child care leaves). For the purpose of this study, it is important to distinguish the potential effects of policies that reduce women's time off from the effects of policies that provide financial incentives to take time off. See Marcia K. Meyers, Janet C. Gornick, and Katherin E. Ross, "Public Childcare, Parental Leave and Employment," in Diane Sainsbury, ed., Gender and Welfare State Regimes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
63. Interview conducted by the author at Volvo Truck headquarters, Gothenberg, Sweden.
64. Not only are women underrepresented in the top tier of the Swedish civil service, but women in the public sector typically receive salaries significantly lower than those for private sector jobs. As Gornick and Jacobs demonstrate, the worse the public sector wages compared with private sector wages, the more numerous are the women in the public sector. In other words, even in the otherwise egalitarian Sweden, public sector employment does not necessarily promote gender equality. See Janet Gornick and Jerry Jacobs, "Gender, the Welfare State, and Public Employment: A Comparative Study of Seven Industrialized Countries," American Sociological Review 63 (October 1998).
65. It is possible to include positions of political power as part of the definition of vertical segregation. Nonetheless, this article excludes female representation among legislators, because the causal mechanism of female representation in politics differs from that in the labor market. For women and political representation, see Richard Matland and Donley Studlar, "The Contagion of Women Candidates in Single-Member District and Proportional Representation Electoral Systems: Canada and Norway," Journal of Politics 58 (August 1996);
66. Richard Matland, Institutional Variables Affecting Female Representation in National Legislatures: The Case of Norway," Journal of Politics 55 (August 1993);
67. Andrew Reynolds, "Women in the Legislatures and Executives of the World: Knocking at the Highest Glass Ceiling," World Politics 51 (July 1999).
68. Maria Charles disagrees with the idea that CMES are more segregating, arguing that factors such as postindustrialism matter more. This may be true when we focus on female concentration in service (that is, postindustrial) sectors of the economy, since variables such as service sector size, gender norms, and female labor-force participation rates - and not factors such as employment protection and vocational training - correlate with female occupational concentration. This article, instead of merely comparing CMES and LMES, has focused more on the effects of specific institutional characteristics and extended the analysis to a group of countries usually treated as "mixed cases" in the VOC literature. Maria Charles, "National Skill Regimes, Post-industrialism, and Sex Segregation," Social Politics 12 (August 2005).
69. See Huber and Stephens (fn. 14);
70. Evelyn Huber and John Stephens, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001);
71. Esping-Andersen (fn. 14);
72. Torben Iversen and Frances Rosenbluth, "The Political Economy of Gender: Explaining Cross-National Variations in the Gender Division of Labor and Gender Voting Gap," American Journal of Political Science 50 (January 2006), 1-19;
73. Kenworthy (fh. 15);
74. David Rueda and Jonas Pontusson, "Wage Inequality and Varieties of Capitalism." World Politics 52 (April 2000).
75. Margarita Estévez-Abe and Ken Dubin, "Women's Advancement in Familialist States: A Comparative Study of Japan and Spain" (Paper presented at the annual meeting of American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, August 28-31, 2003).