In
the last half-century, women have streamed into the
labor force and assumed well-paid professional and
managerial positions, but despite such spectacular
gains there remains much entrenched gender inequality.
Indeed, a great many occupations
are
still hypersegregated “gender ghettos”
in which women work almost exclusively with other
women, coming into contact with men mainly to serve
them.
Why have such ghettos persisted even as other types
of gender inequality have disappeared or weakened?
In Occupational Ghettos, Maria Charles and
David Grusky answer this question by showing that
much of this residual occupational segregation is
consistent with “gender essentialism,”
a deeply rooted cultural assumption that women are
well-suited to service and nurturance and that men
are well-suited to physical labor, technical tasks,
and abstract calculation or analysis. This essentialist
form of segregation is revealed, for example, in the
overrepresentation of women in service-oriented nonmanual
occupations and of men in physically-demanding manual
occupations. Likewise, when the patterning of segregation
within the nonmanual sector is examined,
the same essentialist premise is again revealed in
the overrepresentation of men in technical pursuits
(e.g., engineering, computer programming) and of women
in nurturant pursuits (e.g., teaching, nursing). The
core result presented in Occupational Ghettos
is that segregation of the essentialist variety has
proven extremely resistant to change in advanced industrial
countries.
At the same time, much change is found in other forms
of segregation that are not undergirded by gender
essentialism, in particular those forms that rest
on the premise that men are more competent and status-worthy
than women. The competing premise of “male primacy”
is revealed, for example, in the overrepresentation
of men in upper nonmanual occupations (e.g., professions)
and of women in lower nonmanual occupations (e.g.,
clerks). As Occupational Ghettos shows, this
vertical form of segregation is weakening in advanced
industrial countries, a result that may be attributed
to the corresponding breakdown of the cultural premise
of male primacy.
What
are the mechanisms whereby gender essentialism is
translated into segregation outcomes? Most obviously,
employers assign jobs on the basis of widely-held
beliefs about the types of work that are most appropriate
for women and men, while workers themselves also develop
aspirations and preferences based on corresponding
beliefs about the types of work for which they are
most qualified. Although employers and workers are
increasingly unlikely to believe that men are naturally
more competent, able, or status-worthy than women,
they nonetheless continue to believe that there are
fundamental differences between men and women. In
short, men are no longer regarded as better
than women, but they are still regarded as very different;
and this continuing belief in difference allows employers
to assign men and women to different jobs and induces
workers to come to want those different jobs.
Why does essentialism maintain its stranglehold? As
a society, we have long subscribed to a liberal egalitarian
“contract” in which emphasis is placed
on ensuring that individual preferences, however they
may be formed, can be pursued or expressed in a fair
(i.e., gender-neutral) contest. Under this contract,
overt inequalities of opportunity are questioned,
but nothing prevents individuals from understanding
their own competencies and those of others in terms
of standard essentialist visions of masculinity and
femininity. As liberal egalitarianism spreads, women
increasingly enter into higher education and the paid
labor market, yet they do so in ways that reflect
their own “female” preferences, the social
and interpersonal sanctions associated with gender-inappropriate
work, and the essentialist prejudices of employers.
This coloring of employer tastes and worker choices
undergirds the hypersegregation of many occupations.
It follows that sex segregation in modern egalitarian
countries is shaped by a “different but equal”
conception of gender and social justice.
In the long run, it is of course possible that a yet
deeper form of egalitarianism will emerge and delegitimate
- the
tendency of males and females to develop different
aspirations, and
- the
corresponding tendency of employers to make judgments
about (future) productivity through essentialist
lenses.
There
are indeed many signs that just such a revised form
of egalitarianism is developing. Most notably, conventional
sociological understandings of the role of socialization,
social exchange, and power differentials in generating
preferences have diffused widely in contemporary industrial
societies, implying that preferences and choices formerly
regarded as sacrosanct are increasingly treated as
outcomes of unequal and unfair social processes. This
deeper form of egalitarianism has motivated some parents
to attempt to minimize gender bias in the socialization
of their children, at least in the early years of
childrearing before the unremitting influence of societywide
essentialism typically undermines their efforts. Although
it is plausible that this deeper egalitarianism will
ultimately take hold, it bears emphasizing that prevailing
liberal forms of egalitarianism do not delegitimate
essentialist processes and that a true “second
gender revolution,” one that establishes a new
and broader definition of equality, will therefore
be needed to eliminate occupational ghettos.
This line of argument is carefully prosecuted with
a new statistical model of occupational segregation,
a new theory of the sources of segregation, and a
new archive of cross-nationally harmonized segregation
data. The analyses, which are based on both cross-national
and longitudinal comparisons, are the most comprehensive
to date of the underlying structure of occupational
sex segregation.
About
the authors:
Maria
Charles is Associate Professor of Sociology
at the University of California, San Diego. She completed
a Ph.D. at Stanford University in 1990. Her research
explores processes of social inequality from a cross-national
comparative perspective. With her collaborators, she
has studied sex segregation and the sexual division
of labor within households, labor markets, and systems
of higher education.
David
B. Grusky is Professor of Sociology at Stanford
University. He is currently studying the rise and
fall of social classes under advanced industrialism,
the underlying structure of occupational segregation
by race and sex, and long-term trends in patterns
of occupational and geographic mobility.
Occupational
Ghettos: