National Skill Regimes, Postindustrialism, and Sex Segregation

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Abstract
Data from ten industrial market societies are used to assess the relative explanatory power of two macro-structural accounts of crossnational variability in occupational sex segregation: one by Estévez-Abe, Iversen, and Soskice (in Varieties of Capitalism), which emphasizes effects of labor-market skill regimes and social policy provisions, and an alternative account, which emphasizes the segregating effects of postindustrial economic restructuring. Results suggest that a country’s level of postindustrial economic development is the more powerful predictor of men’s and women’s relative occupational distributions. Service sector expansion and economic rationalization interact with deeply institutionalized ideologies of gender difference to intensify some forms of gender inequality, generating surprising patterns of cross-national variation in sex segregation. Although occupational training requirements and social policy provisions undoubtedly help shape individual career choices, these institutional arrangements are themselves influenced by cultural beliefs about what men and women are good at and how they behave.

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