INDUSTRIAL TRANSFORMATION AND EMPLOYMENT PARTICIPATION: MECHANISMS OF CHANGE IN THE SEXUAL DIVISION OF OCCUPATIONS

Due to the dramatic rise in women\u27s participation in paid labor, a large and growing literature in the social sciences has attended to issues of female employment. The present study, examining the sexual division of occupations, focuses on its mechanisms of change. Two theoretically-based explanations attempting to account for occupation sex-differentiation trends are confronted. The modernization thesis argues that industrialized economies allocate labor based on skill regardless of gender. Hence, industrialization not only increases opportunities for women to work, but it also decreases differentiation. On the other hand, segmentation theory contends that employment takes place within sex-segmented labor markets; growth of the female work force has been constricted to just a few occupations so that differentiation has expanded. Using an ecological approach which operates on the premise that occupational opportunities of subordinates are influenced by characteristics of places\u27 populations and economies, the current research analyzes occupational distributions by sex for all large American cities for the period 1950-70. Odds ratios extracted from log-linear models are utilized to measure trends in differentiation. This procedure avoids shortcomings of previous methodological techniques by controlling simultaneously for both the sex and occupational structure of the labor force. Examination of the data shows that the modernization argument is too simplistic to explain the trend. In contradiction to its prediction differentiation is found to be substantial and rising. It is suggested that shifts in occupational differentiation according to gender can be understood in the context of segmented labor markets. No firm support is provided for the sex-labelling aspect of segmentation theory. Heightened women\u27s involvement in the cash economy is found to lead to lowered odds for them being in upper-status positions as occupational sex-typing predicts. However, it is not expected that this connection would also decrease females\u27 chances belonging to other white-collar occupations as well as raise their odds for blue-collar work. When cast in terms of split labor market theory, these results are readily explained by the dynamic of competition-exclusion-differentiation