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Cotrunentary: The Need to Study the
14 T~sfo~don of Job Secures
MARYELLEN R. KELLEY
Research undertaken within an institu-
tional framework attempts to explain labor
market outcomes for different race and sex
groups (e.g., relative wages, unemployment
rates, and occupational status) as a function
of the efforts of trade unions, professional
associations, and employers to control the
employment relationship. The arrange-
ments that shape the work situations of dif-
ferent groups have been described by John
Dunlop (1958) as a "web of rules," both for-
mal and informal, that structure employ-
ment opportunities and allocate workers to
different segments of the labor market. ~
In Chapter 13, Boos and Reskin have
shown that the phenomenon of sex-segre-
gated work can be analyzed, at least in part,
as a function of this reguiatir~g of labor mar-
ket operations. They discuss institutional ar-
rangements that have been found to restrict
women's entry into the higher-paying, more
stable jobs typically held by men. In so doing,
the authors have focused on only one set of
practices that regulate labor market opera-
~ For a recent presentation of segmented labor mar-
ket theory, see Gordon et al. (1982~.
261
lions: those that pertain to the allocation of
workers to different kinds of employment
opportunities. Within that general category,
their analysis is further limited to rules that
act as artificial barriers to the movement of
women out of the so-called female domain
of work into male-typed jobs. While their
efforts to identify all the exclusionary prac-
tices that have been uncovered by research-
ers in recent years in the areas of recruit-
ment, hiring, initial job assignment, training,
promotion, and intrafirm transfer are valu-
able, I think this is an insufficient view of
the problem. The problem encompasses the
whole literature, and therefore my remarks
should be taken to be constructive and mainly
directed towar~future research both con-
ceptual and empirical.
First, I discuss some of the limitations of
the studies to which Boos and Reskin refer.
I then offer a brief criticism of the concep-
tual framework they themselves use in dis-
cussing the institutional arrangements that
promote a sex-divided workplace.
It is difficult to draw any general conclu-
sions about the relative importance of the
many specific practices described by the au-
thors in explaining patterns of sex segrega-
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262
MARYELLEN R. KELLEY
~ .
tion in employment.This is because the re-
search to which they refer is exploratory, its
purpose being to identify different practices
and to show how they act as barriers to the
integration of women into male-typed jobs.
For the most part, the research consists of
case studies of particular establishments or
small sample surveys of individuals from se-
lected occupational groups. Some of the
practices the authors describe are welI-known
and blatant examples of deliberate sex bias.
But the more obvious barriers may not be
the major impediment to the integration of
women into male-typed jobs. There is a need
for research that, in a systematic fashion,
examines the incidence of certain practices
within and across industries, occupational
groups, and locales.
I recognize that it is extremely difficult to
do such research. It requires the coopera-
tion of managers and union officials, who
may not want to have a researcher look too
closely at the inequities in their practices.
Even so, such research is needed to dispel
whatever misconceptions we may have about
the relative importance of one or another
kind of arrangement. Making checklists of
"source of bias" is not enough certainly
not if we ultimately care about formulating
an effective policy and strategy for change
that will result in the improvement of the
economic position of large numbers of
women.
One problem with lists is that they are
static. Organizational rules and the institu-
tional arrangements of labor markets change
over time including exclusionary prac-
tices. Thus, for example, arbitrary and sex-
biased entry requirements to union-con-
trolled apprenticeship programs in the
building trades were once effective barriers
to women's employment in the construction
industry because the unions acted] as "em-
ployment intermediaries between their
members ant] contractors" through hiring-
hall arrangements (GIover and Marshall,
1977:26~. As a consequence ofthe increasing
importance of the nonunion sector in the
construction industry during the 1970s, the
apprenticeship programs and hiring halls of
the building trades are no longer effective
methods for controlling entry to construc-
tion jobs, for either men or women (MilIs,
19801.
Another problem with lists is that they
tend to imply that at least some increase in
equal treatment would be gained by the re-
moval of any one of these barriers, holding
the others constant. But in any sort of com-
plex work situation, that is unlikely. Rules
interact. Let me illustrate by criticizing an
aspect of my own recent work (Kelley, 1982~.
In the case of complex seniority systems,
the absence (or even removal) of rules that
penalize mobility across sex-segregated job
ladders may not signal (or lead to) a mean-
ingful change or improvement in the op-
portunities for women to be promoted into
male-typed jobs, if the rules governing the
selection of eligible workers permit the em-
ployer to hire from the outside (rather than
strictly promote from within) or if those
higher-paid jobs simply are not expanding.
This leads me to my major concern with
the conceptual framework within which Boos
and Reskin have placed their discussion of
how the regulation of labor market opera-
tions promotes sex segregation. They have
focused on those arrangements that inhibit
the integration of women into the male do-
main of work. Research on racial stratifica-
tion tends to do the same thing: "White"
jobs are the norm and the object of inquiry;
the problem is seen as one of how to reduce
the barriers to entry to those jobs for people
who are not white. This association of an
institutionalist analysis almost exclusively
with rules that restrict competition within
labor markets reflects an implicit theoretical
assumption: that the regulation of labor mar-
ket operations is primarily the result of ef-
forts offormally organized groups of workers
(in trade unions or professional associations)
to protect (or "shelter") themselves from
competition with each other, from different
groups within the membership or from non-
members. There are, however, two other
areas of regulation that this perspective ne-
OCR for page 263
COMMENTARY
263
glects. Both entail looking at the active, self-
interested roles of personnel managers, in-
dustrial engineers, and strategic corporate
planners in structuring the employment re-
lationship. I have in mind rules that channel
women into same-sex employment oppor-
tunities in the first place, together with those
that govern the creation of new, explicitly
"female" jobs.2
There are a number of examples of re-
search examining how men are channelled
into what are thought to be appropriate ca-
reer paths, but little research has been done
to investigate that question for women. Os-
terman's recent study (1980) of the early work
experience of young men is the kind of re-
search that needs to be done on young
women. In that study, Osterman examines
the Unction of certain small-sized establish-
ments in the secondary labor market in pro-
viding training and experience for entry into
large organizations with characteristically
primary-sector jobs. Such linkages between
young women's early work experiences (by
type of employer) and their future career
paths within the so-called traditional domain
of female-typed work need to be investi-
gated to discover if there exist typical "feeder"
systems for regulating the flow of young
women into labor market segments in which
women predominate and to understand in
what ways they are similar to or different
from those that seem to apply to young men.
Roos and Reskin's focus on barriers gives
short shrift to those practices that structure
the employment opportunities facing wo-
men- e.g., job design, wage setting for in-
dividual jobs, and location decisions pro-
mulgated unilaterally by managers. Instead,
2 There is yet another approach, which Roos and Re-
skin ignore altogether: the radical feminist literature
that focuses not so much on competition or other proc-
esses within markets for wage labor as on the relation-
ship of such markets to nonmarket institutions, notably
patriarchical relations in the household and the linkages
between paid and unpaid work. For examples of each,
see Hartmann (1979) and Power (1983~.
these structures are taken as given. Like so
many writers concerned about the problem
of sex-segregated work, these authors treat
the problem of the sex-typing of jobs almost
as if it were a fact of nature. That is, because
the sexual division of labor in some form is
evident in all societies, regardless of their
social or economic structures, and because
sex differences in treatment have a long his-
tory in this country, it is assumed that the
separation of the sexes in the workplace to-
day has been a constant for a long period of
time and is ultimately exogenously deter-
mined by social and cultural forces outside
the employment relationship. To Roos and
Reskin, "traditional" sets of jobs are readily
identifiable as invariantly male or female.
These distinctions are so apparent and
thought to be so enduring over time that
the authors do not feel that they even need
to tell us what they mean by the categori-
zation "traditionally male" or "traditionally
female."
Besides the implication that the compe-
tition between men and women is more im-
portant than the conflict between workers
and the managers who administer employ-
ment systems, Roos and Reskin's depiction
of rigidly sex-segregated spheres of work ig-
nores the great changes in technology and
the occupational structure of the U. S. econ-
omy that have taken place over the past 80
years and the shifts in the domains of wom-
en's work that have occurred at the same
time. 3 Because affirmative action policy pre-
scriptions motivate their analysis, the au-
thors are concerned almost exclusively with
the set of practices by which people are
processed through a given structure of jobs
3 For an exposition of the relationship between tech-
nological change and the growth of employment op-
portunities for women in the twentieth century, see
Baker (1964~. For a less benign view on how the in-
troduction of new work methods and machinery has
affected the task structure of jobs and the demand for
different kinds of workers, see Braverman (1974) and
Edwards (19791. For a study that describes the chang-
ing sexual division of labor within new areas of work,
see Kraft (1979~.
OCR for page 264
264
MARYELLEN R. KELLEY
and the reward systems to which they are
attached. The importance of job design cri-
teria, job evaluation practices, and the lo-
cation of work in maintaining sex segrega-
tion is hardly considered. But in fact we
have evidence that new jobs are often de-
signed and valued explicitly in relation to
the gender of the work force expected to be
recruited to fill those positions. For exam-
ple, according to one recent study on work
organization and the location decisions of
managers, branch offices were located in
communities in which large numbers of
married women could be expected to be in
need of employment (because of high un-
employment among male heads of house-
holds). Their labor market choices were also
constrained by geographic immobility and
child care responsibilities (Teegarden, 19831.
Barbara Ehrenreich's most recent mono-
graph (Fuentes and Ehrenreich, 1983) is one
of a growing number of feminist studies of
the ways in which electronics firms search
the globe for locations where they will be
able to continue to organize assembly work
around the use of extremely low-paid young
women.
By limiting the analysis to only those rules
that act as barriers to or constraints on wom-
en's movement into and out of different types
of work, the analyst can account only for
differences in the ways in which women ant]
men are processed through a given structure
of jobs and system of rewards. To explain
how jobs become sex-typed or indeed, even
resegregated, after having been integrated,
we need also to take into account how the
structure of work changes, i.e., how man-
agers bundle tasks into jobs and how those
jobs are then linked to particular reward
systems and opportunity structures.
REFERENCES
Baker, Elizabeth Faulkner
1964 Technology and Women's Work. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Braverman, Harry
1974 Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degrada-
tion of Work in the Twentieth Century. New
York: Monthly Review Press.
Dunlop, John
1958 Industrial Relations Systems. New York: Holt.
Edwards, Richard
1979 Contested Terrain: The Transformation of the
Workplace in the Twentieth Century. New York:
Basic Books.
Fuentes, Annette, and Barbara Ehrenreich
1983 Women in the Global Factory. New York: In-
stitute for New Communications.
Clover, Robert W., and Ray Marshall
1977 The response of unions in the construction in-
dustry to antidiscrimination efforts. In Leon-
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Gordon, David M., Richard Edwards, and Michael
Reich
1982 Segmented Work, Divided Workers. Cam-
bridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press.
Hartmann, Heidi I.
1979 Capitalism, patriarchy and job segregation by
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Kelley, Maryellen R.
1982 Discrimination in seniority systems: A case
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1979 The industrialization of computer program-
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Mills, D. Quinn
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Osterman, Paul
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
employment opportunities
