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1、Sex segregation in the workplace.by Barbara ReskinAnnual Review of Sociology Annual 1993 v19: 241-269. Pp. 248-265, below.EXPLAINING PERSISTENCE AND CHANGE IN SEX SEGREGATIONExplanations for sex segregation are often classified by whether they emphasize workers (supply-side) or employers (demand-sid
2、e) actions. Supply-side explanations usually focus on female and male workers occupational choices, while demand-side explanations stress actions by employers, including discrimination. Although I use a demand-supply framework to organizethis review of factors linked to persistence and change in sex
3、 segregation, it tends to obscure the importance of factors that influence both workers and employers. These include sex-role stereotypes and other cultural values including occupations sex labels, the distributions of occupations and industries, government policies and their implementation, and the
4、 actions of the sex-typical workers. Obviously, occupational sex labels influence both employers notions about appropriate workers and workers ideas about acceptable lines of work. Similarly, male workers may inhibit integration both by their ability to shape employers decisions and by affecting the
5、preferences of female workers. Factors that operate on both the supply and the demand sides are discussed in the sections on employers as well as workers. Employers Preferences and Practices Employers assign workers to jobs, either directly or through personnel practices that govern their internal l
6、abor markets; indeed, employers create jobs for a substantial proportion of new hires (Granovetter 1974, Rosenbaum 1985). Therefore employers actions contribute substantially to the concentration of women and men in different jobs (Rosenfeld 1983:638, Bielby & Baron 1986b:216, Reskin & Roos 1990). E
7、mployers Preferences and Sex DiscriminationGatekeepers discriminate when they treat people unequally based on an aversion toward onegroup or an affinity toward another that is unrelated to individual performance. There is no doubt that discriminatory practices have consigned millions of women to sex
8、-typical jobs. Until the mid-1960s the majority of firms had jobs that were openly off limits to one sex (Grinder 1961, Strom 1987, Goldin 1990). Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a turning point. In barring mostfirms with at least 15 employees from assigning jobs on the basis of sex, the a
9、ct made it illegal for employers to impose segregation on workers. Amendments to Title VII and Presidential Executive Orders in the years that followed created a legal foundation for challenging sex segregation. Of particular importance was a 1971 Executive Order extending to women the requirement t
10、hatfederal contractors take affirmative action to eliminate the effects of past discrimination. These laws and regulations subjected discriminating employers to law suits, fines, budget cuts or the loss of federal contracts, and bad publicity. The very existence of such rules sends the dualmessage t
11、o employers, workers, students, and teachers that a persons sex should not limit their opportunities and that employers who fail to provide equal opportunities are suspect. The federal Civil Rights Act led the courts to invalidate state laws prohibiting women from certain occupations (e.g. tending b
12、ar) or certain tasks (e.g. lifting more than 35 pounds), although many employers continued to cite these no-longer valid laws to justify segregation (Bielby & Baron 1986a). Case studies of a few employers or industries under consent decrees (e.g. AT&T, the steel industry) showed the integrative effe
13、cts of regulatory agency activity (see Northrup & Larson 1979, Deaux & Ullman 1983). The targeting of the banking and insurance industries in the 1970s by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission opened predominantly male jobs in those industries to women without dampening womens dominance of cus
14、tomarily female jobs. However, haphazard enforcement limited the direct impact of laws and regulations (Reskin & Hartmann 1986:91). When regulatory agencies fail to enforce laws, they send a message to employers, condoning segregative personnel practices. Ultimately, assessing the extent to which an
15、ti-discrimination and affirmative-action laws and regulations curtailed segregation is not possible. In the first place, these laws made employers more wary about openly treating the sexes differently. Differential treatment has become harder to document, and researchers must usually infer discrimin
16、ation or intervention effects from statistical comparisons. Such studies suggest that when anti-discrimination laws are enforced, they have contributed to workplace integration (Leonard 1989, Baron et al 1991). However, the evidence of researchers and litigants suggests that discrimination still pla
17、ys a significant role in perpetuating segregation (Levinson 1975, Halaby 1979, Kelley 1982, Blau 1984, Reskin & Hartmann 1986, Rhode 1991), surviving because of lackadaisical enforcement, organizational inertia, and employers outright opposition to integrating jobs. Just as it is not possible to est
18、imate the extent to which anti-discrimination laws have promoted integration, it is equally impossible to determine whether the impact of discrimination on perpetuating segregation is declining. Given a shift toward a more egalitarian gender ideologyduring the 1970s (Thornton et al 1983) and employe
19、rs sensitivity to community values (Szafran 1982:185), we might expect discrimination to have declined, but the publics ambivalence regarding the desirability of assigning men and women to identical kinds of work (Thornton et al1983), and mens stake in maintaining their sex-based privileges (Reskin
20、1988, Cockburn 1991) suggest that sex discrimination is likely to persist as a force in job assignments and promotions. Employers Preferences, Sex Stereotyping, and Occupational Sex Labels Custom contributes to segregation through employers stereotypes about workers and about jobs that produce a sex
21、-specific demand for workers for particular jobs. Employers assign the sexes todifferent jobs in part because of beliefs they hold about women and men. Indeed, Bergmann (1986:114) contended that a segregation code prohibits mixing the sexes as equals and reserves upper-level jobs for men. Surprising
22、ly little attention has been paid to the effect of employers gender-role attitudes on their personnel decisions, although Reskin & Padavic (1988) found that holding traditional gender-role attitudes predisposed supervisors against using women in customarily male plant jobs. The evidence for the posi
23、tive association between female bosses and more rapid integration (Baron et al 1991, Kulis & Miller-Loessi 1992) may reflect female andmale bosses differential acceptance of gender-role attitudes or sex stereotypes. However, evidence regarding the association between employers sex and firms level of
24、 segregation is limited. Given the pervasiveness of sex stereotypes in our cultural vocabulary, stereotypes areavailable to justify either sex doing many kinds of work, but the stereotypes employers cite to justify assigning the sexes to particular jobs (Oppenheimer 1968:226-27, Bielby & Baron 1986a
25、, Milkman 1987, Reskin & Padavic 1988) may be post-hoc justifications for segregation (Reskin &Roos 1990:50-52). Occupational sex labels influence job assignments independent of potential workers actual qualifications (Oppenheimer 1968, Bielby & Baron 1986a), usually perpetuating-but sometimes reduc
26、ing-segregation. For example, whether the previous incumbent was female and the percentage of female educational administrators in a job each increased the probability that a new hire would be female (Konrad & Pfeffer 1991). What we label custom is often organizational inertia or the aura of inevita
27、bility (Baron et al 1991:1365) that is the legacy of past decisions that took into account workers sex in classifying jobs or setting pay (Bridges & Nelson 1989, Kim 1989, Strang & Baron 1990). As a result, large, established civil service agencies displayed slower rates of integration between 1979
28、and 1985 than young (or very old) agencies (Baron et al1991:1386). The customary sex composition of jobs can both retard and accelerate womens access to nontraditional work. California state agencies that relied on a predominantly female workforce moved toward integration targets more rapidly than t
29、hose with a more male workforce (Baron et al 1991). Similarly, women are more likely to enter traditionally male occupations infemale- than male-intensive industries (Shaeffer & Lynton 1979, Milkman 1987:51, Reskin & Roos 1991). As a result, pronounced growth of heavily segregated occupations and in
30、dustries will increase the amount of segregation in a society, and waning segregated occupations and industries will reduce segregation (Blau 1989). The Demand for Workers The relative magnitudes of the demand for and supply of qualified workers can prevent employers from acting on their preferences
31、 in filling jobs. An inadequate pool of qualified sex-typical workersprompts employers to turn to nontraditional workers. This happens when occupational growth outpaces the supply of labor or when other activities such as military service draw customary workers out of an occupations labor pool. As a
32、 result, occupational growth, low unemployment, and a shortage of qualified male workers have enhanced womens access to nontraditional jobs (Oppenheimer 1970, Skold 1980, Anderson 1982, Abrahamson & Sigelman 1987, Milkman 1987, Baron et al 1991, Cubbins 1991, Reskin & Roos 1990, Lorence 1992:141). S
33、ubstantial occupational growth can markedly reduce segregation. Indeed, an estimated one fourth of thedecline in occupational sex segregation between 1970 and 1990 stemmed from the growth of managerial jobs (Jacobs 1992). Organizational growth is also associated with lower segregation in firms and p
34、ublic agencies (Szafran 1984, Bielby & Baron 1984, Baron et al 1991), although industrial growth during the 1970s was not. Occupations in growing industries employed smaller proportions of women, while those in declining industries relied increasingly on women(Glass et al 1988:264). One indicator of
35、 labor supply-unemployment rates (either total or male)has shown inconsistent associations with occupations sex composition (Szafran 1984:69, Albelda 1986, Abrahamson & Sigelman 1987, Jones & Rosenfeld 1989:676, Reskin & Roos 1991). Thus, while growth is neither necessary nor sufficient for a declin
36、e in sex segregation, most research suggests that growth fosters womens access to male occupations. Research on the conditions under which growth has an integrative effect is needed. Economic Pressures The costs of hiring, training, and paying prospective workers influence employers personneldecisio
37、ns, regardless of whether they seek to make a profit. All other things being equal, most employers prefer the cheapest qualified workers available, so womens lower market wage should make them attractive candidates for male- as well as female-dominated jobs. In reality, of course, mens higher averag
38、e pay has not induced very many employers to employ women intypically male jobs; countervailing forces discussed in this essay intervene. However, employers particularly pressed to reduce costs or increase profits should rely more heavily on women for sex-atypical jobs. Specifically, highly competit
39、ive economic sectors, economically marginalindustries, and labor-intensive jobs should be less segregated than their opposites. Research regarding this expectation is mixed. Supporting the hypothesis are findings of greater segregation in capital-intensive than in labor-intensive industries (Bridges
40、 1980:66, Milkman 1987), in nonservice industries than the service sector (Lorence 1992), and in core than periphery firms (Lyson 1985, Reskin & Roos 1991). Also, the more concentrated in the South manufacturing jobs were, the more female an industrys workforce (Wallace & Chang 1990). But other stud
41、ies cast doubt on this hypothesis. Jobs in monopolistic industries and core firms were less segregated than in more competitive sectors (Bielby & Baron 1984); manufacturing industries that enjoyed greater market concentration and hence could afford higher-priced workers nonetheless were more likely
42、to employ women than those with less market concentration (Wallace & Chang 1990); manufacturing industries with fewer resources segregated blue-collar workers more than resource-richer settings (Wharton 1986); and California public agencies made headway in integrating jobs despite property-tax limit
43、s that drastically cut state revenues (Baron et al 1991:1394). Longitudinal designs and firm-level research are needed to disentangle theseinconsistent findings regarding employers resources, their economic power, and their propensity to segregate workers. Some scholars have hypothesized that employ
44、ers with slack resources or who are buffered frompressures to maximize profits (e.g. the public sector, monopolies, and industries with cost-plus government contracts) can indulge a taste for discrimination in assigning workers to jobs (Stolzenberg 1982, Szafran 1982, Cohn 1985:18-22). Although ther
45、e is some historical support for this reasoning (e.g. Cohn 1985, Milkman 1987:68), administrative oversight and political forces constrain how employers use discretion (Szafran 1982). Recently external forces have imposed costs on employers who segregated the sexes. Anti-discrimination regulations o
46、f the 1960s and early 1970s made it illegal for employers to exclude workers from any jobs because oftheir sex. Two federal agencies-the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office for Federal Contract Compliance Programs-as well as various state agencies are charged with enforcing discri
47、mination bans and affirmative- action programs for federal contractors. Thus, political pressure on public employers and private government contractors to practice equal employment may offset their insulation from economic pressures. Indeed, public agencies and federal-contract holders tend to be le
48、ss sex segregated than the private sector and noncontractors (Salancik 1979, Beller 1982, Wharton 1989). Employers responsiveness to external pressures is seen in greater declines in segregation in agencies dependent on federal funds, as well as those sanctioned by the California State Personnel Boa
49、rd, and those in which outsiders rather than an agencys own affirmative-action personnel oversaw staffing activities(Baron et al 1991:1394). However, the integrative effects of enforcement efforts and the threat of litigation appear to be short-run (Beller 1982:390, Deaux 1984, see also Rosenbaum 1985), which is not surprising given the limited federal enforcement activity in the 1980s (Burbridge1984). Any factor that reduc
