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Gendering the Varieties of Capitalism. A Study of Occupational Segregation by Sex in Advanced Industrial Societies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Margarita Estévez-Abe
Margarita Estévez-Abe
Affiliation:
Harvard University, [email protected]
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Abstract

This article explores the unintended gendered consequences of employment protection and vocational training systems. It develops a micrologic of skill investment by workers and employers to identify the mechanism by which specific skills become disadvantageous for women. The central claim of the article is that institutions that encourage male investment in specific skills exacerbate occupational sex segregation. The article finds that coordinated market economies, because of their robust institutional protection of male skill investments, are generally more sex segregating than are liberal market economies. The empirical section provides cross-sectional analyses of advanced industrial countries.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , October 2006 , pp. 142 - 175
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 2006

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References

1 Despite the common use of dissimilarity index as a way of capturing degrees of sex segregation, it fails to capture the multifaceted nature of occupational segregation. For discussions on the complexity of sex segregation as a phenomenon and different measurements, see Anker, Richard, Gender and Jobs: Sex Segregations of Jobs in the World (Geneva: ILO, 1998)Google Scholar; Charles, Maria, “Cross-National Variation in Occupational Sex Segregation,” American Sociological Review 57 (August 1992)Google Scholar; Charles, Maria and Grusky, David, “Models for Describing the Underlying Structure of Sex Segregation,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (January 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hakim, Catherine, “Explaining Trends in Occupational Segregation: The Measurement, Causes, and Consequences of the Sexual Division of Labour,” European Sociological Review 8 (September 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, “Refocusing Research on Occupational Segregation: Reply to Watts,” European Sociological Review 9 (December 1993)Google Scholar; Nermo, Magnus, “Models of Cross- National Variation in Occupational Sex Segregation,” European Societies 2 (September 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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11 Charles and Grusky (fn 3).

12 Ibid., 302.

13 Ibid., 302–3.

14 Esping-Andersen, Gosta, Social Foundation of Postindustrial Economics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Klausen, Jytte, “The Declining Significance of Male Workers: Trade-Union Responses to Changing Labor Markets,” in Kitschelt, Herbert, Lange, Peter, Marks, Gary, and Stephens, John, eds., Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)Google Scholar; Huber, Evelyn and Stephens, John, “Partisan Governance, Women's Employment and the Social Democratic Service State,” American Sociological Review 65 (June 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; OECD, Women and Structural Change (Paris: OECD, 1994)Google Scholar.

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16 Mandel, and , Semyonov, “A Welfare State Paradox: State Interventions and Women's Employment in 22 Countries,” American Journal of Sociology 111 (May 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 See Hall, Peter A. and Soskice, David, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, introduction. I differ from other authors in the voc camp in thinking that long-term relationships between employers and workers also facilitate the accumulation of general skills. While Gary Becker argues that employers do not invest in general skills, for reasons that are discussed in this article, labor markets marked by robust internal labor markets de facto turn general skills into quasi-firm-specific skills in terms of their mobility.

18 For the feminist critique of the welfare state literature, see Orloff, Ann Shola, “Gender and Social Rights of Citizenship: State Policies and Gender Relations in Comparative Research,” American Sociological Review 58 (June 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daly, Mary, “A Matter of Dependency? The Gender Dimension of British Income Maintenance Provision,” Sociology 28 (November 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daly, Mary and Rake, Katherine, Gender and the Welfare State (Cambridge: Polity, 2003)Google Scholar; Sainsbury, Diane, “Dual Welfare and Sex Segregation of Access to Social Benefits: Income Maintenance Policies in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Netherlands, and Sweden,” Journal of Social Policy 22 (January 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sainsbury, Diane, ed., Gendering Welfare States (London: Sage Publications, 1994)Google Scholar; Sainsbury, Diane, ed., Gender and Welfare State Regimes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 This section draws on the insights in Margarita Estevez-Abe, Torben Iversen, and David Soskice, “Social Protection and the Formation of Skills: A Reinterpretation of the Welfare State,” in Hall and Soskice (fn. 17).

20 See Estévez-Abe, Iversen, and Soskice (fn. 19); Hall, Peter A. and Gingrich, Daniel, “Varieties of Capitalism and Institutional Complementarities in the Macroeconomy: An Empirical Analysis” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 2001)Google Scholar; Iversen, Torben and Soskice, David, “An Asset Theory of Social Policy Preferences,” American Political Science Review 95 (December 2001)Google Scholar.

21 Becker, Gary, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar.

22 See Acemoglu, and , Pischke, “Why Do Firms Train? Theory and Evidence,” NBER Working Paper no. 5605 (1996)Google Scholar; and idem, “The Structure of Wages and Investment in General Training” Journal of Political Economy 107 (June 1999)Google Scholar.

23 For a full discussion of policies that protect employers’ human capital investments, see Margarita Estevez-Abe, Welfare and Capitalism in Postwar Japan (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

24 Employers who take in apprentices have an interest in making sure that apprentices complete the contract (and in many cases stay on to work for more years). They are thus more likely to take in male apprentices when there are enough male applicants. Apprenticeships are likely to be gender segregating precisely because they involve employer-provided on-the-job training.

25 Comparable occupational data—and gender breakdown—are not always available; for a good account of data problems, see Anker (fn 1).

26 Anker's data do not contain figures for female occupational concentration for Beligum, Denmark, and Ireland. The percentage of women in manufacturing has not been attained for the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, and Switzerland. The percentage of women in the private sector is not available for Australia, Ireland, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. Employment protection legislation index for Luxembourg is not available. Gender attitude variable is not available for Australia, Luxembourg, New Zealand, and Switzerland. Although Anker includes data for Italy on the number of women and men in managerial positions, Italy has been dropped from the analysis in this article because the number of small family-owned companies in Italy seems to have inflated the number of women in managerial positions. This decision was made after consulting economists at the Bank of Italy.

27 UNESCO also offers international educational data of gender breakdown of vocational and general education. Unfortunately, UNESCO provides the gender breakdown for fewer countries (Japan, Austria, Demark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland). UNESCO data also show that there are fewer women on vocational tracks than men. UNESCO, “Secondary Technical and Vocational Education,” Statistical Issue (March 1995)Google Scholar.

28 UNESCO (fn. 27).

29 German apprenticeship programs have always been extremely gender segregated: when we look at the most popular five programs among men—all of which are craft skills—we find that 98 percent of enrollment is male. Austria is similar. See CEDEFOP, ed., Vocational Training in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berlin: The European Center for the Development of Vocational Training, 1991)Google Scholar; CEDEFOP, ed., Vocational Training in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berlin: The European Center for the Development of Vocational Training, 1995)Google Scholar; CEDEFOP, ed., Vocational Education and Training in the Republic of Austria (Thessaloniki, Greece: The European Center for the Development of Vocational Training, 1995)Google Scholar.

30 For the details of the index, see Nicoletti, Giuseppe, Scarpette, Stefano, and Boylanud, Olivier, “Summary Indicators of Product Market Regulation with an Extension to Employment Protection Legislation,” OECD Economic Department Working Paper no. 18 (1999)Google Scholar.

31 It converts the number of paid leave days into fully paid days. Meyers, Gornick, and Ross have devised an index to measure the mother friendliness of welfare states. I do not use it here because it is a composite index that lumps together policies that reduce women's time-off work (that is, public child care provision) and policies that financially compensate for their time off (that is, paid maternity and child care leaves). For the purpose of this study, it is important to distinguish the potential effects of policies that reduce women's time off from the effects of policies that provide financial incentives to take time off. See Meyers, Marcia K., Gornick, Janet C., and Ross, Katherin E., “Public Childcare, Parental Leave and Employment,” in Sainsbury, Diane, ed., Gender and Welfare State Regimes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

32 Interview conducted by the author at Volvo Truck headquarters, Gothenberg, Sweden.

33 Not only are women underrepresented in the top tier of the Swedish civil service, but women in the public sector typically receive salaries significantly lower than those for private sector jobs. As Gornick and Jacobs demonstrate, the worse the public sector wages compared with private sector wages, the more numerous are the women in the public sector. In other words, even in the otherwise egalitarian Sweden, public sector employment does not necessarily promote gender equality. See Gornick, Janet and Jacobs, Jerry, “Gender, the Welfare State, and Public Employment: A Comparative Study of Seven Industrialized Countries,” American Sociological Review 63 (October 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 It is possible to include positions of political power as part of the definition of vertical segregation. Nonetheless, this article excludes female representation among legislators, because the causal mechanism of female representation in politics differs from that in the labor market. For women and political representation, see Matland, Richard and Studlar, Donley, “The Contagion of Women Candidates in Single-Member District and Proportional Representation Electoral Systems: Canada and Norway,” Journal of Politics 58 (August 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Matland, Richard, “Institutional Variables Affecting Female Representation in National Legislatures: The Case of ‘Norway,” Journal of Politics 55 (August 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Reynolds, Andrew, “Women in the Legislatures and Executives of the World: Knocking at the Highest Glass Ceiling,” World Politics 51 (July 1999)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Maria Charles disagrees with the idea that CMEs are more segregating, arguing that factors such as postindustrialism matter more. This may be true when we focus on female concentration in service (that is, postindustrial) sectors of the economy, since variables such as service sector size, gender norms, and female labor-force participation rates—and not factors such as employment protection and vocational training—correlate with female occupational concentration. This article, instead of merely comparing CMEs and LMEs, has focused more on the effects of specific institutional characteristics and extended the analysis to a group of countries usually treated as “mixed cases” in the voc literature. Charles, Maria, “National Skill Regimes, Post-industrialism, and Sex Segregation,” Social Politics 12 (August 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 See Huber and Stephens (fn. 14); Huber, Evelyn and Stephens, John, Development and Crisis of the Welfare State: Parties and Policies in Global Markets (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Esping- Andersen (fn. 14);Torben Iversen and Rosenbluth, Frances, “The Political Economy of Gender: Explaining Cross-National Variations in the Gender Division of Labor and Gender Voting Gap,” American Journal of Political Science 50 (January 2006), 1–19Google Scholar; Kenworthy (fn. IS); Rueda, David and Pontusson, Jonas, “Wage Inequality and Varieties of Capitalism.,” World Politics 52 (April 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37 Estevez-Abe, Margarita and Dubin, Ken, “Women's Advancement in Familialist States: A Comparative Study of Japan and Spain” (Paper presented at the annual meeting of American Political Science Association, Philadelphia, August 28–31,2003)Google Scholar.