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SOSC 102U

Lecture Note 5

Sex Segregation in the Workplace

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Sex Segregation

• Definition: the different distributions of men and women across different occupations, jobs, and places of work.

• Consequences: • 1. It lowers women’s earnings relative to men. Why? • A. Women tend to be overrepresented in lower-paying

jobs and men in higher-paying ones;• B. Occupations that are predominantly female tend to

pay less to both male and female incumbents than predominantly male occupations pay.

• 2. Once jobs and equipment are designed with a certain sex in mind, segregation tends to perpetuate itself.

• E. g. women would receive less on-the-job training that they cannot move into better or less-segregated jobs.

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A History of Sex Segregation in the United States: the 17th. Century

• Frontier Economy• Men: agricultural work; • Women: manage the household and

manufactured most of the items that the household consumed; women also earned an income by selling or bartering homemade products such as soap and lace and by providing such services as spinning or caring for the sick

• But the work of the sexes often overlapped

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A History of Sex Segregation in the United States: the 18th. Century

• Commercialization• European immigrants:

– Small businesses such as grocery stores, butchers, shoemakers, drugstores, printers, coopers, silversmiths, innkeepers, etc. were opened as family businesses.

– Widowhood was the only path to independent entrepreneurship in these lines of work.

• African-American people: – Male slaves: field work; – Female slaves: both field and domestic work

• The line divided women’s work from men’s work was not strictly drawn.

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A History of Sex Segregation in the United States: the 19th. Century

• Industrialization• Men outnumbered women in the labor force as a whole• Women monopolized a few occupations, especially those whose low

pay and poor working conditions did not attract men, such as domestic service

• Interplay between race and sex in segmented labor market:– Native-born white men: factory workers, craft workers, clerks,

entrepreneurs, or professionals– Chinese men: migrant farm workers, miners, and railroad builders– Latino male immigrants: garment manufacturing, cigar-making,

hotel and restaurant jobs, and laundries– Single female immigrants from Ireland, Scandinavian, and

Germany: domestic service– Jewish female immigrants: sewing and other “needle trades”

• In the late 19th. Century, sex segregation in the workplace was firmly established. New occupations created by industrialization were quickly sex-labeled as women’s or men’s work.

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Sex Segregation in the early 20th. Century

• The general trends: The bureaucratization of work in the early 20th. Century gave rise to millions of clerical jobs that became labeled as women’s work and a sizable number of management jobs that were initially labeled as men’s work.

• Management positions are reserved for men. It becomes a pattern till 1990.

• Job ladders for predominantly female jobs are rare.• Particular historical events:• World War I. (1914-1918) brought new opportunities for

women• The Great Depression (late 1920s and early 1930s):

state policies on overcoming the economic disaster were to provide jobs for men. Married women were excluded from the labor force.

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Sex Segregation before the W. W. II.

• W. W. II. (1941-1945): Men joined the army, women were recruited to take over the “men’s work”

• To attract women for the customarily male jobs, a slogan was circulated : “If you can run a sewing machine, you can operate a rivet gun.”

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Sex Segregation after the W. W. II.

• After the World War II., women were laid off from customarily male jobs

• Did World War II. experiences change the sexual division of labor in the U. S. labor market?– No. Ruth Milkman’s case study on General Motors

plant in New Jersey shows that no women worked in auto assembly jobs for two decades after the world, but jobs like this had been conducted by thousands of women during the war.

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Civil Rights Act: institutionalization of anti-sexual discrimination

• Title 7 of the 1964 Civil Rights Act: discriminate on the basis of sex became illegal

• But the regulation was not taken seriously until the 1970s

• Women entered into conventionally “men’s jobs” from the 1970s

• Affirmative Action and the End of Sexual Discrimination in the contemporary U. S.?

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Occupational-level Sex Segregation

• The labor market is composed of different occupations: 500 different occupations are listed in the U. S. census bureau

• Index of occupational sex segregation: the proportion of female (or male) workers who have to change to an occupation in which their sex is underrepresented for the sexes to be evenly distributed across occupations and hence, fully integrated– Index=0: men and women were perfectly integrated– Index=100: every occupation employed only men or only women

• Index according to the U. S. Census Bureau 1998, 1999 and 2000: 52.1 (52.1% of the female labor force would have to shift to disproportionately male occupations to achieve occupational-level integration.

• During 1900-1970, the index of occupational sex segregation was between 65 and 69.

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Top 10 Occupations for Each Sex, 2000 (Renkin and Padavic, p. 66)

Women (total labor force: 65983000) Men (total labor force: 74627000)

Secretaries 2984000 4.5%Managers and administrators, n. e. c. 5487000 7.4%

Managers and administrators, n. e. c. 2518000 3.8%

Supervisors and proprietors, sales occupations 3054000 4.1%

Cashiers 2490000 3.8% Truck drivers 2958000 4.0%

Supervisors and proprietors, sales occupations 2042000 3.1% Janitors and cleaners 1614000 2.2%

Registered nurses 1974000 3.0% Carpenters 1410000 1.9%

Teachers, elementary 1844000 2.8% Cooks 1300000 1.7%

Nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants 1833000 2.8%

Computer systems and analysts and scientists 1166000 1.6%

Bookkeepers, accounting and auditing clerks 1736000 2.6%

Sales representatives, mining, manufacturing, and wholesale 1164000 1.6%

Waiters and waitress 1165000 1.8%Laborers, except construction 1058000 1.4%

Receptionists 1090000 1.7%Supervisors, production occupations 960000 1.3%

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Job-Level Segregation

• DF: Sex segregation within occupations• Example 1: Sturm’s research shows that in an

accountant office, female accounts were assigned to clients in non-profit, health care, and retail sectors; male accounts were assigned to mergers and acquisitions

• Example 2: Bieby and Bieby’s research : many writers are female, but only a quarter of screenwriters are female.

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Establishment-level Segregation

• DF: the differing distributions of women and men who pursue the same occupations across different establishments

• Example: female state prison guards in female prisons; male guards in male prisons

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Sex segregation: a cross-national phenomenon

• According to International Labor Organization, occupational sex segregation is “extensive in every region, at all economic development levels, in all political systems, and in diverse religions, social and cultural environments”

• Worldwide, women tend to be limited to fewer occupations than men: 75% of working women are in 7 occupations--nurses, secretaries/typists, housekeepers, bookkeepers and cashiers, building caretakers and cleaners, caregivers, sewers and tailors

• Most of the above work conform to sex stereotypes on women

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Trends in occupational sex segregation

• Historical experiences suggest that shifts in sex-typed jobs mostly involve women replacing men as the majority, but not the other way around

• Throughout the 20th. Century, occupational racial segregation (i. e., differences between African Americans and whites) has been improved greater than occupational sex segregation (men and women)

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Indexes of Occupational Sex and Race Segregation, 1900-2000

Padavic and Reskin (2002: 73)

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Remedies for Sex Segregation (1)

• A. Gender Ideology (sex stereotypes; sex labeling of occupations and jobs);– Change languages as well as occupations’

sex labels: – stewardess flight attendants;– Mailman letter carriers;– Fireman firefighters;– Waitress/ waiters waitperson or servers.

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Remedies for Sex Segregation (2)

• B. Hostility toward members of the other sex:

• Affirmative Action Regulations: set goals (but not quotas) for integrating minorities and women into their workforce and to develop mechanism to achieve these goals

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An example (and controversy) of setting goals for integrating minorities• Can we give people from “subordinate groups” (such as

women and people of color) special advantages to get a job or to access to education?

• Example: The Admission Lawsuits against the University of Michigan (see the report)– Do you agree with the school’s attempt to achieve diversity? – Does the school’s recruitment policy violate the principle of

fairness?(How were the cases closed? check here)

Ballot

Result and analysis

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Remedies for Sex Segregation (3)

• C. Employers’ Action: • 1. Recruitment practice: Use open recruitment

instead of informal referrals--public announce job openings so outsiders can learn about sex-atypical jobs.

• 2. Bureaucratic personnel practices (job postings, written job descriptions and evaluation criteria, written records for job candidates) can curtail managerial discretion, thereby fostering sex integration.

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Remedies for Sex Segregation (4)

• 3. Require top leaders to commit to equal employment opportunity

• 4. “Outdated assumptions” on job assignments: • Redesign jobs and work schedule to accommodate a

greater proportion of the labor force.• D. Workers’ Action: • Revisit both the human-capital theory and gender role

socialization• Coworkers should react to people entering sex-atypical

jobs more support• Offer women and minorities more choices