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OCR for page 157
Commentary: Strober's Theory of
Occupational Sex Segregation
KAREN OPPENHEL\I MASON
As Francine Blau's review of the litera-
ture in Chapter 7 makes clear, neoclassical
economists have had relatively little to tell
us about the causes of sex segregation in the
American economy. Economists have paid
far more attention to the consequences of
occupational sex segregation than to its causes
and, as often as not, have attributed its ex-
istence to unspecified "tastes" or amorphous
institutional factors outside the economy.
Even when the nature of these tastes or
institutional factors has been made con-
crete, the explanations offered have often
failed to withstand the test of logic or em-
pirical analysis.
In light of this, Myra Strober's attempted
leap beyond the neoclassical in Chapter 8 is
to be applauded. By explicitly recognizing
that men exploit women and derive various
advantages from doing so, Strober has sought
to explain the existence and persistence of
sex segregation in an economy that in many
other ways may operate according to neo-
cIassical market principles. Although Strob-
er's attempt is not entirely successful, it is
nonetheless valuable. Because her theory is
straightforward and provocative, it provides
an important stimulus to discussion and hence
157
to refining our ideas about the causes of oc-
cupational segregation. In what follows, then,
I begin by criticizing Strober's theory. I then
discuss sociological and economic ideas that,
together with Strober's theory, help explain
the job segregation ofthe sexes in the Amer-
ican economy.
Strober's theory lays the ultimate blame
for occupational sex segregation on the pa-
triarchal system in which men enjoy wom-
en's sexual, child-rearing, and domestic
services in the household. The immediate
blame for segregation, however, is laid on
employers, most of whom are men. Em-
ployers are said to strive toward two goals
(goals that Strober recognizes as potentially
contradictory): (1) profit maximization and
(2) enforcing the economic dependency of
women on men. The latter is of interest to
male employers because it provides the ma-
terial base for the patriarchal system, i.e.,
it forces women to become dependent wives
and mothers (employers are said to worry
about maintaining women's dependency on
men in social classes other than their own
because threats to patriarchy in the working
class may lead to threats to patriarchy within
the managerial or capitalist classy. In hiring
OCR for page 158
158
KAREN OPPENHElM MASON
workers for their establishments, employers
are thus said to concern themselves not only
with minimizing their wage bill (the usual
neoclassical assumption) but also with min-
imizing the risk that women of a given race
and class will earn more than the men of
that race and class and consequently will no
longer be dependent on them and forced to
marry them.
How do employers meet the double goals
of profit maximization and of ensuring wom-
en's dependency on men? They do so, Strober
argues, by offering all new jobs first to men,
at a wage determined by conditions in the
local labor market. These jobs are offered
to women only if men refuse to take them.
Strober in turn argues that men's willing-
ness to take particular jobs depends entirely
on economic considerations: Unlike their
bosses, male workers are strictly profit max-
imizers. Thus, if they can earn more money
elsewhere, male workers wit! turn down the
jobs that a particular employer offers them.
The result is that the poorer-paying jobs are
left for women, the better-paying jobs hav-
ing been snatched up by men. Strober's the-
ory thus suggests why there is a wage gap
between the sexes as well as occupational
sex segregation.
There are several points in Strober's the-
ory with which I agree and for which there
is fairly good empirical evidence. Women
in this society are without question econom-
ically disadvantaged compared with men,
and this situation is hardly an accident of
history or nature. There are obvious ideo-
logical (Williams and Best, 1982), legal (Ka-
nowitz, 1969), and informal mechanisms
(Bernard, 1971:88-102) that maintain the
system producing this disadvantage and that
continue to do so even in the face of major
protest movements. Most employers today
are men and as men can be suspected of
having a stake in the system of male privi-
lege (Goode, 19821. There also are a. least
two fairly clear historical examples of oc-
cupational abandonment and succession—
instances in which men left one line of work
when new and better-paying jobs opened
up, leaving the old line of work to be filled
by women: school teaching and clerical work
(see Oppenheimer, 1970:77-79; Davies, 1982:
56-581.
Nevertheless, while containing sound
elements, Strober's theory has several prob-
lems. Although it attempts to go beyond
standard neoclassical assumptions, it retains
enough of these assumptions to encounter
one of the most serious problems that neo-
ciassical explanations for sex discrimination
tend to face, namely, the seemingly coun-
terfactual prediction that sex segregation will
gradually disappear. Moreover, whether
Strober's theory can explain the extremely
high levels of occupational sex segregation
observed in our economy and preserved
through decades of industrial change is un-
clear. And for the historical period for which
it seems intencled, Strober's theory is in sev-
eral key respects surprisingly implausible.
Finally, whether an entirely new theory of
occupational sex segregation is needled is open
to debate. Let me elaborate on each ofthese
points.
THE PROBLEM OF THE DEMISE OF SEX
SEGREGATION
As Blau (Chapter 7 in this volume) and
others (e.g., Stevenson, 1978) have noted,
most neoclassical theories of occupational
segregation imply that it will gradually dis-
appear because nondiscriminatory employ-
ers or firms will be at an economic advantage
over other firms and will consequently ex-
perience greater growth. This implied dis-
appearance of segregation is problematic,
however, because occupational segregation
has in fact remained firmly entrenched in
our economy for over a century (Oppen-
heimer, 1970:64-77; Gross, 1968; Williams,
1979; Matthaei, 1982:187-2321.
Strober's theory suffers the same prob-
lem. In an economy in which employers typ-
ically offer new jobs to men first, withhol(l-
ing them from women until such time as
OCR for page 159
COMMENTARY
159
men have refused to take them, an employer
who offers jobs to women first is likely to
minimize his wage bill much more success-
fully than will discriminatory employers, be-
cause women's wages will have been driven
downward by other employers' discrimina-
tory practices. Over time, then, any em-
ployer whose desire for profits outweighs his
desire for maintaining patriarchy is likely to
undercut competing firms, thereby experi-
encing greater growth. The long-run impli-
cation is that such firms will succeed and
discriminatory firms will fail, meaning that
occupational sex segregation should gradu-
ally disappear.
THE PROBLEM OF EXIREME
SEGREGATION
There is considerable evidence to suggest
that the occupational segregation of the sexes
in our economy is extreme. Studies of de-
tailed occupations—which aggregate jobs
and hence tend to underestimate the true
extent of job segregation show that at least
two-thirds of male or female workers would
have to switch occupational categories for
the sexes to achieve identical occupational
distributions (e.g., Williams, 19791. More-
over, studies conducted at the industry or
firm level (e.g., Blau, 1977; Bielby and Baron,
Chapter 3 in this volume) suggest an even
higher level of segregation. To be plausible,
then, a theory of job segregation must read-
ily explain not only the existence of some
sex segregation in our economy but also the
existence of extreme segregation. A closer
look at Strober's theory raises doubts on this
score.
The basic tenets of Strober's theory can
be interpreted in terms of a system of job
and worker queues and their mapping onto
each other within the labor market. In the
simplest case, there is one job queue and
one worker queue. In the job queue, jobs
are ordered according to wage level, while
in the worker queue, workers are ordered
according to gender, and within gender cat-
egories, according to "qualifications." Em-
ployers and the market then function to cre-
ate a one-to-one mapping between the two
queues, with the best-qualified male worker
getting the best-paying job and the best-
qualified female worker getting a lower-pay-
ing job than any male worker.
Although this mode] implies the existence
of job segregation between the sexes (or at
least does so if we assume a tight connection
between jobs and wage rates), the magni-
tude of the segregation implied will depend
on where the divide between the sexes falls
in the job queue. If the divide happens to
coincide with the divide between two dif-
ferent jobs, there will be perfect segregation
of the sexes. If it does not, however, there
will be some degree of job integration, the
precise degree depending on the number of
positions in the job that straddles the divide
between men and women in the worker
queue (if there is a very large number of
positions, a substantial portion of the work
force may ens! up employed in the inte-
grated job). ~
To be sure, the notion that an entire labor
market can be ordered into a single job and
a single worker queue is unrealistic. Never-
theless, even if we imagine labor markets
consisting of multiple job and worker queues,
a mapping process of the kind described here
seems likely to result in some degree of job
integration, possibly far more integration than
is in fact observed in our economy. Only if
there are separate male and female job and
worker queues, as some scholars believe
~ Throughout this commentary, I distinguish be-
tween a job which is a particular bundle of tasks as-
signed to individual workers in a given industry or
firm- and a position, which represents one slot in a
given job. There are certain jobs that involve only one
position (e.g., President of the United States), but most
jobs involve multiple positions. Hence, it is quite pos-
sible in the queue-matching system that Strober's the-
ory implies for the divide between men and women
within the worker queue to fall in the middle of a
multipositioned job, thereby producing sexual integra-
tion of that particular job.
OCR for page 160
160
KAREN OPPENHEIM MASON
there are (e.g., Edwards, 1975), is the high
level of segregation observed in our econ-
omy likely to occur. Thus, whether the basic
tenets of Strober's theory necessarily imply
the existence of high levels of job segrega-
tion is unclear.
Perhaps in recognition of this possibility,
Strober supplements her theory's basic ten-
ets with a set of ad hoc arguments about the
actions both employers and male workers
are likely to take once a job has become
substantially but not entirely occupied by
men. Strober argues that employers in this
situation can pursue two courses. They can
either fill the remaining positions with women
workers, but pay them less than the male
workers in the job in order to keep the women
in an economically inferior position, or they
can raise the job's wage level in order to try
to attract men into the remaining positions.2
While the first ofthese strategies will clearly
maintain women's economic inferiority to
men, it will not result in sexual segregation
of the job. Thus, for her theory to imply a
high level of job segregation, Strober must
argue that employers will prefer the second
strategy to the first.
Strober offers three reasons why employ-
ers might want to raise wages in order to
make heavily male jobs entirely male. The
first reason, which Strober states very cur-
sorily, is that hiring women (even at an in-
ferior wage) "would erode the principles of
patriarchy and male privilege." It is unclear
why the hiring of women at lower wages
would erode patriarchy, since in Strober's
theory the inferior earnings of women are
apparently sufficient to maintain patriarchal
relations. This first reason, then, is uncon-
· .
vlnclng.
Strober's second reason for suggesting that
employers will prefer to hire men is that
hiring women "might violate possible socie-
2 There is actually a third option that I am ignoring
here, only because it does not change Strober's theory
materially that is, that the employer's attempt to hire
foreign or immigrant labor.
tat taboos about the two sexes working to-
gether on certain jobs." Although this is an
intriguing suggestion, just how common such
taboos are and whether they can explain the
existence of high levels of segregation in the
workplace is unclear.3 Strober herself seems
to think that the enforcement of such taboos
is probably not the sole explanation for why
employers prefer to hire men for jobs that
are already heavily mate; she describes the
taboos as "possible" and pertaining only to
"certain jobs." Moreover, whether job seg-
regation and physical separation are nec-
essarily coterminous is unclear. Indeed, it
is probably just as common for workers in
a given job to work at some distance from
each other (e. g., parts inspectors who work
in different locales within a plant) or for male
and female workers in distinct jobs to work
in close physical proximity to each other (e.g.,
a female secretary and her male boss) as it
is for workers in the same job to work side
by side while those in different jobs work
apart from each other. Thus, although re-
search into taboos against mixed-sex work
groups would be usefill (as Strober notes),
the ability of these taboos to explain the high
level of segregation observed in our econ-
omy seems doubtful.
Strober's final reason for suggesting that
employers will fill an already largely male
job with men is little more compelling than
the first two reasons. It is that hiring women
"would . . . interfere with male bonding."
I am uncertain what "male bonding" is sup-
posed to refer to (it smacks of reductionist
3 The reason for the existence of these taboos is also
not entirely clear. Presumably, a fear of illicit sexual
relations is what motivates any desire to ensure that
men and women do not work side by side. A desire on
men's part to maintain social distance from their status
inferiors (women), however, might be just as impor-
tant. In this case, however, the functional i.e., job
separation of the sexes would presumably be more
important than would their physical separation; and
male workers would be as concerned with maintaining
patriarchy as with maximizing their economic gain (con-
trary to Strober's main theoretical tenets).
OCR for page 161
COMMENTARY
16
arguments about men's psychological "needs"
or"masculine instincts," the existence of
which is questionable). It is hard to believe
that employers operating in a competitive
and largely unregulated economy (the sit-
uation that Strober seems to be referring to)
would deliberately raise their wage bill sim-
ply because hiring women might "interfere
with mate bonding."4 Thus, in the final anal-
ysis, the willingness of employers to fill sub-
stantially male jobs with more expensive male
workers rather than turning to cheaper fe-
male workers remains unclear.
If it is implausible that employers are the
ones likely to ensure that high levels of job
segregation exist, then in Strober's theory
it must be male workers who do so (the only
other possible creators of segregation are
women, but in Strober's theory women are
assumed to be powerless in the labor mar-
ket). Strober's description of how male
workers reinforce or increase segregation is
as follows: Once an occupation has been
"typed" as male (a process that seems to be
inevitable, though for reasons Strober does
not make clear), men "will actively and col-
lectively seek to keep women out, fearing
that if women enter, they will lower the
earnings of the job by accepting lower wage
rates or, if they are paid the same as men,
diminish patriarchal hegemony."
It is unfortunate that Strober does not
explicate these ideas further, since a num-
ber of questions remain unanswered. Why,
for example, must male workers fear wom-
, . . `` . ,, . . ~
en s Incursion into t Heir occupations ~ em-
ployers are no less interested in ensuring
women's economic inferiority than the male
workers are? (Indeed, Strober initially im-
plies that employers are more concerned
4 It plausibly might do so were male workers to press
for the exclusion of women through organized protests
or political action (something that Strober later sug-
gests they may indeed do). In this section of her argu-
ment, however, Strober is apparently concerned only
with employers' own interests, not with the necessity
of giving in to certain political pressures from male
workers.
about preserving the sexual "purity" of oc-
cupations than the male workers are.) And
what will male workers gain by preserving
"patriarchal hegemony" (which is undefined
but which I assume means monopolizing all
the positions in a given job)? Male workers
may, of course, fear that their boss's desire
to earn profits will overcome his desire to
bolster the patriarchal system, thereby lead-
ing him to replace male workers with less
expensive female workers. But this possi-
bility raises a more fundamental problem
with Strober's theory, namely, how employ-
ers resolve the tension between the goals of
profit maximization and maintaining patriar-
chy. In the end, then, Strober's attempts to
ensure that her theory implies the existence
of a high level of job segregation raise as
many questions as they answer.
THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT'
Although Strober does not spell out the
precise historical period her theory is sup-
posed to cover, it seems to pertain primarily
to conditions in the mid to late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries, i.e., prior to
any significant state intervention into the
free market economy for the purpose of reg-
ulating employment conditions.5 In this
context, Strober's theory seems implausible
in three respects. First, because the econ-
s This is certainly the period to which the example
of school teaching pertains and is also the period during
which much of the sex typing found in today's labor
market was established (Oppenheimer, 1970:64-120;
Snyder and Hudis, 1976~. Moreover, Strober's con-
cluding remarks about the impact of equal employment
opportunity legislation suggest that state intervention
in the free marketplace may change the terms of her
theory (although only if that intervention takes partic-
ular forms). Finally, even if Strober intends her theory
to be atemporal, it is important to recognize that the
sex segregation of the economy has a history and that
the processes influencing the economy can change over
time. For all ofthese reasons, I have chosen to interpret
Strober's theory as though it was primarily intended
to describe late nineteenth and early twentieth century
conditions, even if Strober herself did not have this
explicitly in mind when creating the theory.
OCR for page 162
162
KAREN OPPENHEIM MASON
omy to which she refers was more highly
competitive than is the monopoly economy
of the twentieth century, the assumption
that employers would be willing or able to
forgo profits in the interests of maintaining
domestic patriarchy seems especially open
to question. One can envision firms rela-
tively insulated from free market pressures
making this choice, but it is much harder to
envision small, struggling firms in the un-
regulated marketplace doing so.6
Also relatively difficult to accept in the
nineteenth-century context is the notion that
employers wishing to ensure that women
earn less than men would bother with the
complex procedure that Strober describes,
i. e., offering jobs to men first, waiting to see
if all positions are filled by men, etc. In the
nineteenth century, there seems to have been
little feeling that employed women de-
served the same wages or job opportunities
as men (Smuts, 1959:110-142; Kessler-Har-
ris, 1981:54-701. Hence, a much easier strat-
egy for the employer wishing to pay women
less would have been to do just that: pay
women less than men, regardless of the job.
To be sure, in some situations this strategy
might have required inventing separate job
titles for women and men, so that the dis-
parity in wages between the sexes could be
masked or socially justified. But employers
seem perfectly capable of inventing separate
job titles or pay grades when they want to
(e.g., Newman, 19761. Thus, even if we are
willing to believe that nineteenth-century
employers were interested in ensuring that
women were paid less than men, whether
they would have used the system Strober
describes is questionable. Indeed, because
a straightforward system of wage discrimi-
6 It is interesting that the particular occupation Strober
studies is found in the public sector and hence does
not involve the same competitive forces that affect pri-
vate sector employment. The assumption that employ-
ers are willing (and able) to forgo profits in order to
help maintain patriarchy may be more realistic in the
public sector than in the private one.
nation wouIc] have helped minimize some
employers' wage bills, there is every reason
to think employers would have preferred
this approach to the "first dibs to men" ap-
proach that Strober outlines. Only with the
creation of state-enforced regulations re-
quiring equal pay for equal work does the
approach Strober describes become more
plausible.
A final point that is implausible in the
nineteenth-century context is the idea that
male employers would try to maintain wom-
en's economic inferiority in social classes other
than their own. Strober's argument here is
akin to a domino theory of political change.
If working-class women are allowed to be-
come economically independent from the
men of their class and are consequently freed
from the need to marry and serve them,
then upper-cIass women might be inspired
to follow their working-cIass sisters down
the road to independence. Thus, even though
most male employers would never seek to
have their sons marry working-class women,
they are said to be motivated to maintain
gender inequality in the working class out
of concern for their own position vis-a-vis
upper-class women.
While there may be some validity to this
idea in historical periods when feminist con-
sciousness transcends class barriers, the idea
seems implausible for the late nineteenth
century, when most upper-class women ap-
parently had little sense of identification with
their working-class sisters or at best had a
highly patronizing identification that made
clear their own social superiority. Certainly,
upper-class women in this period were will-
ing to exploit the working-cIass women they
hired as domestic servants, often treating
them with little consideration or with the
sense that the servant girl had much in com-
mon with the lady of the house (Katzman,
1978:158-1731. Moreover, although nine-
teenth-century working-cIass women did not
earn as much money as did working-cIass
men, in some parts of the country these
women worked in large numbers (Mason et
OCR for page 163
COMMENTARY
163
al., 1978). Yet despite this, upper-class
women in these areas remained firmly de-
voted to the "cult of domesticity" and, by
implication, to the patriarchal system.
Working-cIass women's relative independ-
ence thus seems to have posed little threat
to upper-cIass women's commitment to re-
maining laclies and hence economically de-
pendent on their husbands.7 This makes the
idea that upper-class men would have cut
into profits in order to ensure the economic
inferiority of working-class women seem im-
plausible.
FURTHER PROBLEMATIC ASSUMPTIONS
Strober's theory contains two other as-
sumptions that are questionable. The first
is that the wage gap was the only or by far
the most important prop for the patriarchal
system in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Although Strober no-
where states this assumption explicitly, it is
implicit in her argument that, in order to
maintain patriarchy, employers acted to en-
sure the existence of a wage gap. (If patriar-
7 This is not surprising, since it was working-class
women who tended to accept middle-class norms about
a woman's place, rather than the reverse. Most evi-
dence suggests that when women did go to work in the
late nineteenth century, they justified doing so in terms
of their future domestic roles or current family needs
(Smuts, 1959; Matthaei, 1982; Kessler-Harris, 1981,
1982~. In other words, the working-class girl who worked
in a factory or went into service did not see herself as
becoming independent from a potential husband (though
she did sometimes see herself gaining partial inde-
pendence from her family of origin). Rather, work for
most working-class girls was an interlude between
childhood and marriage, during which they helped sup-
port their families, increased their prospects for a "good"
marriage by being able to afford a good wardrobe, or
learned skills that were argued to be helpful to their
future roles as housewives and mothers. It is, there-
fore, not surprising that upper-class women failed to
become feminists in the face of high labor force par-
ticipation rates among their working-class sisters; they
already enjoyed the amenities to which these working-
class women aspired.
chy could be maintained in other ways, why
would employers cut into profits in order to
over jobs to men first?)
Although women's inferior earnings may
have contributed to the patriarchal system
in nineteenth-century society, there were
other institutional factors that also did so.
Among these were the laws and judicial
precedents that made women the legal and
political (as well as economic) inferiors of
men (Kanowitz, 1969:35-93) and a host of
norms, customs, and culturally transmitted
beliefs that taught women to orient them-
seIves exclusively toward careers as wives
and mothers and to otherwise behave in a
manner consistent with their label as the
"weaker" sex (Kessler-Harris, 1982:49-531.
These forces seem to have been no less im-
portant than the dismal wages and dead-end
jobs available to women in convincing them
that marriage and motherhood were the most
satisfactory careers (Matthaei, 1982:101-140;
Kessler-Harris, 1982:20-72, passim). Given
this, whether upper-class men would have
acted against their economic self-interests
in order to produce a wage gap between
working-cIass women and men seems ques-
tionable.
The other problematic assumption im-
plicit in Strober's theory is that, in the con-
text of the labor market, men were more
interested in maintaining the domestic di-
vision of labor between the sexes than any
other aspect of the patriarchal system, in-
cluding the general male prerogative to con-
tro} women and receive deference from them.
True, even when acting as employers or as
workers, men may have been interested in
ensuring that women, as a class, were kept
in an economically inferior position and hence
forced to participate in a patriarchal family
system. But it seems equally likely that, when
acting as employers or workers, men were
concerned about keeping women in their
place on the job, i.e., ensuring that no woman
would outrank or could give orders to a (na-
tive white) man.
To the extent this was true, it makes little
OCR for page 164
164
KAREN OPPENHEIM MASON
sense to think that employers offered all new
jobs to men first. To be sure, if a job in-
volved authority over other workers or, given
the temporary nature of most women's work
(Matthaei, 1982:195-196), required conti-
nuity of employment, then employers no
doubt offered it to men. However, if a job
was routine, easily learned, and neither re-
quired long-term employment nor involved
control over other (male) workers, then em-
ployers had no reason not to offer it first to
women (Matthaei, 1982:1961. Indeed, there
are historical cases in the textile and clothing
industries, as well as in clerical and sales
jobs, in which this appears to be exactly
what happened (Kessler-Harris, 1982:142-
1791. This makes a theory that rests on the
assumption that all new jobs are offered first
to men untenable.
IS A NEW THEORY OF OCCUPATIONAL
SEGREGATION BY SEX NEEDED?
Strober begins her paper by arguing that
existing theories of sex segregation in the
workplace are inadequate. None of these
theories, she states, is "capable of answering
the three major questions concerning the
gender designation of an occupation: its or-
igin, its maintenance, and its change, if any."
Athough Strober is narrowly correct no
single theory in existence at the time her
paper was written could adequately explain
the origins and persistence of sex segrega-
tion in our economy I am not convinced
that a new theory of occupational segrega-
tion is needed. The old theories, although
incomplete and not always systematic,
nonetheless offer considerable insight into
the segregation of the workplace, especially
when considered together. Indeed, in my
judgment, these "old" ideas more persua-
sively suggest why sex segregation is both
extreme and enduring than does Strober's
theory. To argue this claim, I will first re-
view three of the most important ideas in
the sociological, economic, and historical lit-
eratures about the origins or maintenance
of sex segregation and will then attempt an
integration of these three ideas.
The first idea or set of ideas is the most
amorphous, but it is also the most impor-
tant. It is that an "ideology of gender" or
normative/cultural system lies behind and
guides both men's and women's behavior
and in so doing tends to separate the roles
and activities of the sexes, including their
occupational roles (Reskin and Hartmann,
1984:Ch. 2; di Leonardo, 1982~. Basic pre-
cepts in the American ideology of gender
include (1) the assumption that the sexes are
inherently different from each other in char-
acter, temperament, and capacity; (2) the
specific perception that women are naturally
suited to be mothers, soothers, supporters,
andJor pets, while men are suited to be ad-
venturers, leaders, fighters, and doers (Wil-
liams and Best, 19821; (3) the evaluation that
the feminine is of lower prestige (less im-
portant) than the masculine and that for men
to engage in feminine activities or pursuits
is consequently highly stigmatizing (more so
than for women to engage in masculine ac-
tivities or pursuits, although that, too, is
stigmatizing); and (4) the assumption that
men have the right to control women and
women have the obligation to acquiesce in
this control (Collins, 19711.
Because gender is usually the first social
identity learned by children, precepts such
as these are strongly and often uncon-
sciously cherished by both sexes. To the ex-
tent that this is true, such precepts are likely
to shape virtually every decision made by
women and men that affects the jobs into
which they are recruited. This means that,
once a set of occupations has been "typed"
or labeled as appropriate for one sex only,
these labels are likely to persist over time
(unIess revolutionary forces disturb them).
The fact that most individuals in society
are socialized to an ideology of gender that
emphasizes the oppositeness of the sexes
may also help explain why occupations are
sex-typed or labeled in the first place. If
one's social respectability and sense of self-
OCR for page 165
COMMENTARY
165
respect depend on behaving in a manner
appropriate to one's gender (and inappro-
priate to the other gender), then working at
jobs that members of the opposite sex work
at may be degrading. Matthaei (1982:194)
has argued that this was a critical influence
on job segregation in the nineteenth cen-
tury:
Employment in a clearly masculine job, doing
a job done by other men, fortified a man's sense
of manhood; competition with these men to do
the job well, or unification with them against the
"big man," the employer, actively expressed and
measured his manhood.... tOn the over halted,]
doing a job that women also performed expressed
a man's similarity with the opposite sex, showed
him to be womanly and feminine.
Likewise, women wished to work in jobs done
by women. A woman's femininity was already
threatened by her presence in the labor force,
the masculine sphere. . . . If a woman was forced
to seek wages outside of the home she would
seek jobs which were clearly woman's work.
In other words, individual men and women,
in seeking work, may have created or con-
tributed to their own segregation by avoid-
ing employment in sexually integrated jobs.
Other ways in which the ideology of gender
may have influenced the occupational seg-
regation of the sexes in the nineteenth and
early to mid twentieth centuries are noted
below.
The second idea that can help explain oc-
cupational sex segregation in our society is
the concept of statistical discrimination. Be-
cause this concept is reviewed elsewhere in
this volume (see Chapter 7), I wit! not at-
tempt a full summary here. Suffice it to note
that when employers pay for the training of
workers, the perception that women are more
likely than men to leave the labor force in
order to marry or rear children may explain
why employers are reluctant to hire women
for these positions. Employers may also be
reluctant to hire women for supervisory po-
sitions if they believe (as they are likely to)
that this violates the natural order between
the sexes or places women in positions for
which they are inherently unsuited. The no-
tion of statistical discrimination thus sug-
gests how the ideology of gender and the
reality of most women's and men's lives
is likely to influence employers' behavior
and thereby contribute to the sexual seg-
regation of the work force. While it is clear
that statistical discrimination cannot explain
all forms of job segregation (e.g., that which
occurs among unskilled workers doing equally
heavy or light tasks), this concept nonethe-
less points to an important process likely to
contribute to the segregation of male and
female workers.
The final set of ideas relevant to uncler-
standing the sex segregation of the economy
derives from Edna Bonacich's (1972) theory
of the split labor market. The basic tenet of
this theory, which was originally created to
explain the existence of ethnic antagonism,
is that there often are three significant classes
in conflict within capitalist labor markets,
not just the two that Marx identified: (1) the
capitalists or employers, who are concerned
with maximizing profits (a point on which
Marxist and neoclassical economists seem to
agree); (2) the high-priced "established"
workers who, through political organization
and struggle, have managed to wrest some
degree of economic security from the cap-
itaTist class and who are interested in main-
taining or improving this economic security;
and (3) the low-priced workers, i.e., socially
identifiable groups who, for a variety of rea-
sons, are unable or unwilling to demand as
high a wage as the established workers earn
and whose primary concern is simply find-
ing a job, rather than achieving a particular
level of economic security.
In Bonacich's theory, there are three basic
dynamics in the split labor market: (1) the
capitalists try to minimize their wage bflIs
and consequently try to replace high-priced
labor with low-pricecl labor; (2) the low-priced
workers try to find jobs; and (3) the high-
priced workers struggle to protect them-
seIves from the incursion of the low-priced
workers. Bonacich argues that established
OCR for page 166
166
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OCR for page 167
COMMENTARY
167
workers use two strategies in attempting to
protect themselves from the low-priced
workers: exclusion and the creation of caste
systems. In other words, established work-
ers can either try to exclude low-priced la-
bor from the labor market entirely (this is
sometimes done via restrictive immigration
laws) or they can try to restrict low-priced
labor to a narrow range of poorly paid oc-
cupations in which they have little interest.
In the nineteenth century, women were
low-priced workers compared with native
white males. Women typically worked tem-
porarfly, before they were married, and
usually worked as supplemental earners (in
many occupations, including school teach-
ing, the wages they earned were often in-
sufficient to live on; Manhaei, 1982:187-232~.
For these reasons, women were usually wfl~-
ing to work for much lower wages than were
men; they were also less frequently involved
in labor actions (though there were notable
instances in which women formed unions or
participated in strikes; e. g., Dawley, 1976~.
While the "cheapness" of female labor did
not always threaten male workers, there are
well-documented cases in which it did and
in which organized groups of male workers
responded by attempting to ensure that their
own jobs could not be taken over by women
(e.g., by pressing for the passage of protec-
tive labor legislation; see Hartmann, 1976;
Matthaei, 1982:217~. One effect of this was
to segregate women into certain poorly paid
occupations that native white males were
uninterested in. While the actions of male
labor unions in response to the perceived
threat of"cheap" female (and immigrant)
labor cannot alone explain the occupational
segregation of the sexes, it seems to have
been one force that helped create and main-
tain this segregation.
Figure 9-1 depicts what I think is the most
historically accurate and sociologically rea-
sonable integration of these three sets of
ideas. In the mid-nineteenth century the were preferred to men as domestic servants,
period when women as well as men began partly because they could be hired for less
entering wage work in large numbers the money but also because they usually had
ideology of women's and men's separate
spheres was already well establisher} (Kes-
sler-Harris, 1982:20-72~. For married adults
the division of labor between the sexes
matched this ideology, with women devot-
ing themselves for most of their married lives
to domestic work and men to work in the
paid labor force. That this ideology and di-
vision of labor was already in place seems
to have had three consequences. The first
was that when young women and men sought
work they tencled to look for jobs that were
known as women's or men's work, or, if the
jobs were very new, that gave every indi-
cation of becoming women's or men's work
(e.g., because the employer advertised for
members of one sex only, as was typical in
the nineteenth century). In other words, the
first path through which the division of labor
between the sexes and the ideology of sep-
arate spheres influenced the sexual segre-
gation of the work force was by influencing
young men's ant] women's own occupational
choices (Matthaei, 1982:194~.
Second, as the concept of statistical dis-
crimination suggests, the ideology of sepa-
rate spheres and the division of labor be-
tween the sexes also influenced the actions
of various occupational "gatekeepers"—
employers, schoolteachers, employment
agencies, and the householders who hired
domestic servants. One such influence may
have been the one Strober emphasizes,
namely, a tendency to favor men in the hir-
ing process in order to maintain the primacy
of wage work as part of the masculine sphere.
However, occupational gatekeepers' preju-
dices probably had other effects on the oc-
cupational segregation of the sexes as well.
Most important was a tendency to offer jobs
to one sex only according to that sex's sup-
posedly unique talents and traits or accord-
ing to the structural position they were to
occupy within the workplace. For example,
in the period after the Civil War, women
OCR for page 168
168
KAREN OPPENHEIM MASON
prior experience. That they were normally
supervises! by a Woman also meant that re-
lationships between mistress ant! servant
were much less strained than if the servant
was a male (Matthaei, 1982:1981.
Likewise, men were preferred for indus-
trial jobs that involved on-thejob authority
or that required a commitment to the firm
or the establishment (Matthaei, 1982:1961.
Not only was it highly inappropriate for a
woman to supervise others outside her own
home, but also women typically worked only
sporadically and usually quit altogether when
they married. Consequently, they could not
be expected to take on a responsible position
that required considerable on-thejob train-
ing or at least employers were unwilling to
offer them such jobs (most women may have
been uninterested in them, too; see Mat-
thaei, 1982:1941. In various ways, then, the
perceptions of the sexes that occupational
gatekeepers developed during their social-
ization to the ideology of separate spheres
or by simply observing how most women
and men in fact led their lives led them
to hire or direct members of each sex to the
jobs that seemed appropriate for them.
The third influence of the sexual division
of labor and ideology of separate spheres on
the job segregation of the sexes was to
cheapen the price of female labor compared
with male labor. The fact that women were
willing to work for less money than were
most native white men can be seen as a
direct outgrowth of the gender division of
labor during this period of history. Because
women viewed wage work as a temporary
condition designed to help their families (or
to pay for extras such as new clothes), they
were willing to work for lower wages than
were men, for whom work was a central,
lifelong commitment (Matthaei, 1982:193-
1971. As Bonacich's theory and the historical
record both suggest, this led organized groups
of male workers to work for women's re-
moval from certain jobs, something that no
doubt contributed to the overall segregation
of the sexes in the workplace.
The cheapness of female labor may also
have contributed to the segregation of the
sexes through another route. This was by
encouraging employers to hire only women
for jobs for which skills and on-thejob au-
thority were minimal and the costs of labor
turnover were also low. In other words, em-
ployers sought female workers not only be-
cause they perceived them to be inherently
suites! to particular kinds of work but also
because women workers were inexpensive.8
While it is impossible to gauge the impact
this had on occupational segregation com-
pared with the impact of male and female
workers' own occupational choices and the
choices of employers dictated by their per-
ceptions of women's versus men's traits or
patterns of employment, it seems clear that
it contributed to the segregation of the sexes
in the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth
centuries.
In summary, several distinct processes
stemming from the acceptance of a partic-
ular definition of masculine and feminine
roles and temperaments in American society
appear to underlie the segregation of the
sexes within the workplace. If Matthaei
(1982), Kessler-Harris (1982), and other his-
torians are to be believed, women and men
themselves helped create the segregation of
the workplace by seeking jobs in which only
their own sex worked. The tendency to
choose a job labeled appropriate for one's
own sex was exacerbated by the actions of
employers and other occupational gatekeep-
ers who, in keeping with the same precepts
of masculine and feminine behaviors and
the real differences between women's and
8 Marxist theorists also argue that employers hired
men and women for different jobs as part of a strategy
of labor market segmentation designed to keep the
working class weak by creating divisions within it (e.g.,
Edwards, 1975~. As Strober notes, while employers
may indeed have used this strategy, why they chose
gender as one of the bases on which to segment the
labor market is not readily explained by their desires
to weaken the power of the working class.
OCR for page 169
COMMENTARY
169
men's motives for working and patterns of
employment frequently sought workers
of only one sex for particular jobs. Finally,
organized groups of male workers further
reinforced the segregation of the sexes by
acting to ensure that women could not enter
their occupations and thereby lower their
wages. Because individual workers, em-
ployers, and organized groups of male work-
ers all acted in ways that produced a sepa-
ration of the sexes within the workplace, the
extreme degree to which the American
economy is sexually segregated should not
be surprising. Nor should the incredibly slow
speec! at which sex segregation has changed
over the past century (Williams, 1979~.
The main implication of the views I have
presented for the future of occupational seg-
regation between the sexes is very similar
to the point with which Strober ends her
paper. Occupational segregation is unlikely
to disappear or even lessen appreciably un-
less major revisions occur in our ideology of
gender ant! the division of labor between
the sexes. To be sure, some changes in gen-
der ideology and in the male-female division
of labor have occurred during the past four
decades (e.g., Mason et al., 1976; Waite,
19811. And there are starting to be some
noticeable changes in occupational segre-
gation as well (see Chapter 2 in this volume),
perhaps as a result of the ideological shifts.
However, unless we give up our idea that
men and women are inalienable opposites,
more dissimilar than alike, we are unlikely
to see the disappearance of occupational
segregation between the sexes. Ultimately,
job segregation is just a part of the generally
separate (and unequal) lives that women and
men in our society lead, and, unless the
overall separateness is ended, the separate-
ness within the occupational system is un-
likely to end, either.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Barbara Reskin and Louise Tilly
for their helpful comments on an earlier ver-
sion of this paper and Madelon Weber and
Mary Scott for their typing assistance.
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
sex segregation
