Postindustrialism, and Sex Segregation

Data from ten industrial market societies are used to assess the relative explanatory power of two macro-structural accounts of cross-national variability in occupational sex segregation: one by Estévez-Abe, Iversen, and Soskice (in Varieties of Capitalism), which emphasizes effects of labor-market skill regimes and social policy provisions, and an alternative account, which emphasizes the segre-gating effects of postindustrial economic restructuring. Results sug-gest that a country’s level of postindustrial economic development is the more powerful predictor of men’s and women’s relative occu-pational distributions. Service sector expansion and economic rationalization interact with deeply institutionalized ideologies of gender difference to intensify some forms of gender inequality, generating surprising patterns of cross-national variation in sex segregation. Although occupational training requirements and social policy provisions undoubtedly help shape individual career choices, these institutional arrangements are themselves influenced by cultural beliefs about what men and women are good at and how they behave. Occupational sex segregation is one of the most striking and persistent features of modern labor markets. Although women’s access to such public-sphere institutions as higher education and the labor market increased dramatically over the course of the twentieth century