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1 ~ntro~ucdon
BARBARA F. RESKIN
The concept of segregation was first
brought to public attention in the United
States to describe the enforced separation
of black and white children in different
schools. Although strictly speaking segre-
gation denotes physical separation, it typi-
cally involves an institutionalized form of
social distance between dominant and sub-
ordinate groups (Kuper, 1968:144~. Cer-
tainly racial segregation in this country en-
tailed more than physical separation; not only
did it reflect the belief that black children
were not fit to associate with white children,
but it also made other forms of unequal
treatment possible.
Years of litigation, protests, and busing
have brought the concept of segregation into
the public vocabulary and persuaded most
Americans of the existence of racial segre-
gation in schools and neighborhoods. At the
same time, these activities have probably
helped to associate the idea of segregation
with race discrimination. But our society,
like most others, segregates its members on
the basis of characteristics other than race;
I wish to express my thanks to my friend and col-
league, Lowell L. Hargens, for his help in reading and
discussing the papers in this volume.
age, sex, and social class are the most com-
mon. Because most of these forms of seg-
regation mirror social norms about the ap-
propriate and "natural" relations between
groups (Just as prior to the 1954 Brown de-
cision many people defined race segregation
as natural and appropriate) and because of
their very pervasiveness, these forms of sep-
aration are not readily thought of as segre-
gation. We take for granted, for example,
that children will be separated into age-based
groups at school and that they will spend
their days apart from most adults. Indeed,
it is when the accepted patterns of segre-
gation vary that we notice for example,
more than one or two aclults on a school
playground during recess or children in work
settings.
The segregation of the sexes in some
spheres is at least as common as that of chil-
dren from adults. Yet it is often not visible
for two reasons. First, cultural expectations,
which structure our perceptions of the world,
take for granted that most adults live inti-
mately with a member of the opposite sex.
Because such intimacy is at odds with the
mode! of physical separation implied by the
paradigmatic case of racial segregation, it
masks the existence of sex segregation. Sec-
1
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2
BARBARA F. RES KIN
ond, the presence of women and men pub-
licly carrying out a variety of activities to-
gether supports the impression of sex
integration. Superficially these two phe-
nomena appear to invalidate any claim that
the sexes are segregated.
Our interest in this volume centers on the
segregation of women and men at work, re-
gardIess of whether the sexes are substan-
tially segregated in most parts of their lives.
In that context, work can be characterized
as sex segregated in three ways. First, norms
that relegate the sexes to separate spheres
(Welter, 1966; Bloch, 1978)—women to the
home and men to the public sector nec-
essarily imply their physical separation. For
example, domestic workers in the private
sphere, whether they are unpaid or paid,
carry out their duties in a female environ-
ment, pursuing one of the most segregated
jobs. Second, many paid employees work in
exclusively one-sex settings. Whole indus-
tries are dominated by men; metal and coal
mining, fisheries, horticultural services,
logging, construction, and railroads were all
more than 90 percent male in 1980 (Bureau
of Labor Statistics, 1981:Table 30~. Although
there are no industries so overwhelmingly
female, in part because in even the most
female-intensive industries men hold man-
agerial posts, women constitute more than
three-quarters of all workers in several in-
dustries, including direct sales, employ-
ment agencies, convalescent institutions, li-
braries, and apparel and fabricated textile
manufacturing. In 1980 over 32 million
workers were employed in industries whose
work forces were at least 80 percent male
or female, and slightly more than this num-
ber 11 million women and 22 million
men worked in detailed census occupa-
tions in which at least 90 percent of the
incumbents were of their own sex.i In ad-
dition, even within integrated industries,
firms may employ only men or only women
(see Bielby and Baron, in this volume).
Clearly, then, a substantial proportion of
American workers are physically segregated
from the opposite sex.
If we extend the meaning of segregation
beyond physical separation to encompass
functional separation, the workplace is seg-
regated in a third way, with a division of
labor by sex the rule. Furthermore, the
practice of employing women ancl men to
do different jobs within the same work set-
ting is often accompanied by the institu-
tionalized social distance that segregation
frequently entails. This social distance is
marked by differential access to authority
(Wolf and Fligstein, 1979), unequal wages
(Treiman and Hartmann, 1981), separate job
ladders, and exclusionary practices restrict-
ing mobility between positions labeled "male"
and "female" (Roos and Reskin, in this vol-
ume). Hospitals are a good example. As out-
siders, we notice female and male employ-
ees interacting in various ways talking or
joking together in the corridors or wards,
working side by side over patients in ex-
amining and operating rooms, often simi-
larly dressed in lab coats or scrub suits. Yet
nurses, technicians, clerical workers, and food
service workers are overwhelmingly female,
while doctors, administrators, and orderlies
are predominantly male. Ironically, it is the
functional segregation of the sexes into dif-
ferent jobs that renders them interdepen-
dent and ensures their physical integration.
It should be recognized, too, that the phys-
ical integration we observe is preceded, at
least for technical and professional staff, by
separate training programs in which the sexes
are physically segregated. This separation
may help prepare them for the unequal sta-
tus and rewards they experience when as
~ The Census Bureau categorizes occupations at vary-
ing levels of detail. In 1980 the classification referred
to as "detailed" included 503 occupations. The number
of workers in industries that were at least 80 percent
female was computed from Bureau of Labor Statistics
(1981:Table 30~. The number of workers in occupations
that were at least 90 percent members of the incum-
bent's sex was computed from Bureau of the Census
data (1983:Table 1~.
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INTRODUCTION
3
workers they are physically integrated.
Having shown how the concept of seg-
regation applies to women's positions in the
workplace, we must now ask why an inquiry
into sex segregation in the world of work is
necessary. Since dividing work on the basis
of sex is customary in the home, why not in
the workplace? To answer this question, let's
return to the discussion of the consequences
of segregating black and white schooIchil-
dren. Beyond its stigmatizing effects, clif-
ferentiating and separating people are often
accompanied by differential treatment. Just
as the segregated schools to which black
children were sent were inferior to white
children's schools (Kruger, 1975), the jobs
that women hoist provide rewards that are
inferior to those that "male" jobs offer.
Foremost is the effect of segregation on
women's wages. The more "female" an oc-
cupation is, the less it typically pays (Rytina,
1982~. Between 35 and 40 percent of the
well-documented wage gap between female
and male full-time workers can be attributed
to their segregation into different detailed
occupational categories (Treiman and Hart-
mann, 19811. The additional segregation of
women and men in the same occupations
into different jobs explains even more of the
differential. The wage loss associated with
working in female-dominated occupations
has especially adverse consequences for
women who are the sole supporters of their
families. Ehrenreich and StalIard (1982)
commented that it is not the absence of a
man in a household but the absence of a
male salary that pushes working women into
poverty; more precisely, it is the absence of
the salary levels that male-dominated jobs
provide. For women who support families
on their own, segregation may mean pov-
erty.
These facts the pervasiveness of sex
segregation and its economic implications
for women pose important scholarly and
policy questions. What are the current lev-
els of segregation, and what are the pros-
pects for the decade ahead? Why is work so
overwhelmingly sex typed? What kinds of
remedies might reduce segregation levels?
It is these questions to which the papers in
this volume provide answers. The remain-
der of this chapter is an overview of their
themes.
EXTENT, TRENDS, AND PROjECTIONS
FOR THE FUTURE
From its emergence as a major institution
in the nineteenth century, the U.S. labor
force has been highly segregated by sex.
Most occupations were so dominated by one
sex that for decades the Census Bureau
changed gender-discrepant responses for
certain occupations on the assumption that
they represented coding errors (Conk, 1981~.
Empirical studies assessing the extent of oc-
cupational segregation have consistently
confirmed high levels of segregation (Gross,
1968; Blau and Hendricks, 1979; Lloyd and
Niemi, 1979; Williams, 1979; England, 19811.
Despite dramatic changes in both the com-
position of the labor force and the occupa-
tional structure, segregation levels have been
extraordinarily stable throughout the twen-
tieth century. This raises several questions.
First, have social and normative changes in
the 1970s or the existence or enforcement
of antidiscrimination laws led to appreciable
declines in segregation? What are the pros-
pects for the remainder of this decacle? How
much segregation within specific employ-
ment settings is masked by aggregate esti-
mates based on data for occupations? What
can we learn if we go beyond the static pic-
tures that occupational distributions yield to
look at workers' job histories?
The papers on the extent of and trends in
segregation in Part I of this volume illumi-
nate these questions. In Chapter 2, Andrea
H. Beller provides new and encouraging
evidence regarding trends in aggregate seg-
regation levels since 1970. Using Current
Population Survey data for the period be-
tween 1971 and 1981, she documents a 10
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4
BARBARA F. RES KIN
percent decline in the segregation index.
Unlike most of the previous research, she
provides separate analyses for nonwhites and
whites that show more rapid declines among
nonwhites. Especially telling are results that
reveal particular progress within profes-
sional occupations for whites (but not non-
whites), an outcome that Beller argues is
linked to desegregation in college majors.
It is well known that the more closely one
is able to look into the workplace, the more
segregation one will observe. Thus, segre-
gation indices computed for the 11 major
census occupational groupings show consid-
erably less segregation than do indices com-
puted for detailed occupational categories.
However, researchers have not had data sets
that permit them to assess segregation levels
within firms for a large number of estab-
lishments. William T. Bielby and lames N.
Baron's work (Chapter 3) is an important
exception. They examined U.S. Employ-
ment Service data for almost 400 California
firms employing more than 60,000 workers
to address several issues previously beyond
the reach of scholars. The result is a set of
striking and disturbing findings. For ex-
ample, over half the firms were totally sex
segregated: not a single job title was held-
by both men and women. Furthermore,
across all firms, the proportion of workers
who held nominally integrated jobs (i.e., jobs
held by both men and women in a firm) was
only 10 percent. An analysis of the small
number of firms that were minimally inte-
grated permitted the authors to identify
mechanisms that support segregation in dif-
ferent types of establishments. These find-
ings contribute to our understanding of the
organizational bases of sex segregation.
It is also possible to get beyond aggre-
gated occupational data by tracking workers'
patterns of movement between segregated
and integrated jobs. Rachel A. Rosenfeld's
research employs such an approach. In
Chapter 4, Rosenfeld estimates the amount
of such mobility between sex-typical and sex-
atypical occupations and then investigates
its determinants. Of considerable interest
are results broken down by race that show
the proportions of women and men who
moved between occupations in which mem-
bers of their sex were a majority and those
in which they were a minority. Rosenfeld's
subsequent examination of the wage and
prestige consequences of different types of
moves points to factors that may prompt
workers to enter and leave sex-atypical work.
Also important are analyses showing (1) how
workers' personal characteristics are linked
to an occupation's sex type and (2) what char-
acteristics are associated with an individual's
breaking an occupation's sex barrier. Spe-
cific findings, such as the absence of any
effect of family responsibilities on the type
of move a worker makes, bear on theories
that seek to explain segregation.
In commenting on the first three chapters
in Part I, Pamela S. Cain notes in Chapter
5 some apparent contradictions between
them and offers a resolution. She also re-
minds the reader of the inherent limitations
that available tools and data place on study-
ing sex segregation.
In the final chapter in Part I, Andrea H.
Beller and Kee-ok Kim Han use trend data
to project the level of occupational segre-
gation at the end of the decade (Chapter 61.
They use several models to generate a set
of projections. Of particular relevance to
policy makers are the results for models based
on optimistic, intermediate, and conserva-
tive assumptions about the rate of decline,
which could reflect such factors as whether
affirmative action regulations are enforced.
Under the most optimistic assumption, seg-
regation would decline markedly, but the
models that Belter and Han judge to be more
realistic predict only modest declines. Social
policy must be guided by what is likely to
happen in both the presence and absence
of deliberate interventions to reduce seg-
regation. Their paper provides such infor-
mation and draws its implications for policy.
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INTRO ~
5
EXPLAINING SEGREGATION
The chapters in Part II grapple with the
controversial and difficult question of why
gender is linked to the work people do. In-
dividually, each summarizes and weighs the
empirical evidence associated with a partic-
ular explanatory orientation. Jointly, they
provide both a sound foundation and an
agenda for needed research.
Francine D. Blau's paper on labor market
discrimination and occupational segregation
(Chapter 7) is one of three that consider
economic approaches to sex segregation. The
economics literature on discrimination has
concentrated on the role of discrimination
in the wage differential between the sexes
(see Blinder, 1973; Osterman, 1979; Cabral
et al., 1981), but very little has been pub-
lished specifically on the role of labor market
. . . . .
c ~scr~m~nat~on In maintaining sex segrega-
tion. Focusing on this question, Blau criti-
cally appraises the utility of several general
theories of discrimination, including those
invoking taste, overcrowding, monopsony,
statistical discrimination, and dual labor
markets as well as the human capital alter-
native. Having laid out the theoretical al-
ternatives, Blau evaluates the empirical evi-
dence on the extent to which discrimination
contributes to segregation. In doing so she
details the difficulties in trying to measure
discrimination and emphasizes the need for
research that can distinguish between the
various alternatives.
In Chapter 8, economist Myra H. Strober
rejects existing theories of discrimination as
inadequate to explain how occupations get
assigned to one sex or the other and what
contributes to stability or change in these
gender designations. Exploiting ideas from
existing theories, she proposes a provocative
new "general theory" to explain both oc-
cupational segregation and wage differen-
tials. The argument claims that the labor
market behavior of men—employees and
workers—is governed by their desire to
maintain patriarchal privilege in the home
and that pursuing this goal gives rise to both
segregation and lower wages for women.
Historical data on shifts in the gender label
of public school teaching illustrate the the-
ory.
In a close analysis of Strober's theory
(Chapter 9), Karen Oppenheim Mason takes
issue with certain assumptions as empiri-
cally unsupported. Mason disputes Strob-
er's claim that existing ideas cannot ade-
quately explain segregation and offers a set
of theoretical approaches that she contends
account for the persistence of segregation.
It has been suggested that the concentra-
tion of women in certain occupations reflects
their own preferences, which in turn stem
either from beliefs that these occupations
are compatible with women's domestic roles
or from a socialization process that predis-
poses them toward certain kinds of work.
Each alternative has stimulated large bodies
of research. Mary Corcoran, Greg I. Dun-
can, and Michael Ponza review in Chapter
10 the human capital explanation that attri-
butes segregation to women's desire to find
jobs that do not conflict with their domestic
obligations. They put this explanation to a
test with evidence from other research and
their own current work. The authors pre-
sent results from their analysis of data from
the Panel Study of Income Dynamics on the
duration of work experience, part-time work,
and occupational sex composition that chal-
lenge predictions based on the human cap-
ital approach. Of special interest are anal-
yses that cast doubt on the human capital
assumption that skill depreciation and con-
comitant wage losses associated with time
out of the labor force prompt women to es-
chew certain occupations. Their findings
represent an important contribution to the
development of a body of knowledge re-
garding how famflial roles influence wom-
en's occupational outcomes.
Margaret Mooney Marini and Mary C.
Brinton provide in Chapter 11 a compre-
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6
BARBARA F. RES KIN
hensive synthetic review of the massive lit-
erature that links sex typing in socialization
to occupational choice. Their review covers
research on (1) the existence of sex differ-
ences in occupational preferences, knowI-
edge, skills, and traits and (2) whether ob-
served differences result from sex-role
socialization within families, schools, and the
mass media. Because of the direct link be-
tween education and occupational options,
they pay special attention to education in
general and mathematics and science edu-
cation in particular. This chapter, which ul-
timately draws conclusions about the effects
of sex typing on segregation, is an important
resource for researchers.
In response to Marini and Brinton, Wendy
C. Wolf cautions that, in view of the mul-
titude of factors implicated by the occupa-
tional socialization literature, the outcomes
of any particular intervention attempts are
unpreclictable (Chapter 121. She reminds the
reader that most of the literature reviewed
by Marini and Brinton deals with differ-
ences between the sexes before they enter
the labor market. She points out that the
constraining effects of such factors may de-
cline for adult women who face the eco-
nomic realities of earning adequate wages.
In Chapter 13, Patricia A. Boos and Bar-
bara F. Reskin draw on labor market the-
ories to develop a framework in which a
variety of institutional barriers to sex inte-
gration are examined. They focus on formal
procedures within establishments and the
organization of labor markets that discour-
age or exclude workers from entering jobs
that have been defined as belonging to the
other sex. They consider, in turn, barriers
to job training (including apprenticeships),
barriers to entry-level positions, and struc-
tural barriers that limit women's promotion
into and retention in sex-atypical jobs. They
cite a wide variety of studies that show how
these barriers perpetuate the segregation of
the sexes.
In commenting on this paper (Chapter
14), Maryellen R. Kelley points to limita-
tions in the research that Boos and Reskin
review and questions the omission of the
effects of such factors as job design and eval-
uation. Noting that little is known about how
women are channelled into sex-typed career
paths, she calls for research on this topic.
REDUCING SEGREGATION
Policy makers will find the chapters in
Part III on the effectiveness of interventions
to reduce segregation especially useful. In
Chapter 15, Brigid O'Farrell and Sharon L.
Harlan examine the impacts of various in-
terventions on the basis of an extensive
reading of case studies. From these data they
draw some general conclusions about what
kinds of intervention succeed and the con-
ditions under which they work best. They
point out, for example, that, to increase
women's representation in male-labeled jobs,
companies had to modify certain personnel
practices, such as recruitment procedures,
seniority systems, required qualifications,
and job training.
In contrast to O'Farrell and HarIan's sur-
vey of workplace-based remedies, Linda J.
Waite and Sue E. Berryman evaluate the
effectiveness of a single program, the Com-
prehensive Employment and Training Act
(CETA), for several employment outcomes
of black, white, and Hispanic women and
men (Chapter 161. Their statistical analyses
fail to show effects of race or Hispanic eth-
nicity but do show sex differences in pro-
gram assignment consistent with sex seg-
regation. Two especially interesting analyses
address CETA's ability to foster desegre-
gation. The first examines the link between
the sex label of participants' pre-CETA jobs
and their CETA placements, and the second
looks at CETA's record in meeting partici-
pants' preferences for sex-atypical assign-
ments. However, the data Waite and Ber-
ryman use were collected prior to 1978, when
CETA reauthorization legislation maple sex
equity an explicit program goal, as Wendy
Wolfootes in her commentary (Chapter 17~.
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INTRODUCTION
7
Post-1978 evaluations might yield a different
picture.
CONCLUSION
In recapping the papers in this volume,
Francine D. Blau integrates several recur-
r~ng themes (Chapter 181. She points to the
variety of ways that federal activities may
help reduce or sustain sex segregation. Blau
reminds readers that economic parity is not
a necessary consequence of occupational de-
segregation. On the basis of the papers in
this volume, however, it seems unlikely that
we shall have to cope with that concern in
the near fixture. It is to be hoped that the
publication of these papers wall help move
us closer toward that goal.
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OCR for page 8
Representative terms from entire chapter:
labor force
