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ORGANISATIONS, WORK AND SEXUAL DIVISIONS: Occupational change in market economies and remaking gender?. Janette Webb University of Edinburgh. Framing Questions. Interactions of markets and gendered power relations
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ORGANISATIONS, WORK AND SEXUAL DIVISIONS:Occupational change in market economies and remaking gender? Janette Webb University of Edinburgh
Framing Questions • Interactions of markets and gendered power relations • Are some forms of ‘market economy’ more conducive to greater equality between the sexes? • What drives what? • Cultural change in gender relations drives economic restructuring? • Economic restructuring, and occupational change, drives cultural change in gender relations?
Two Models from Feminist Political Economy • Varieties of Capitalism (VOC) • Liberal market economies (LME) • Coordinated market economies (CME) • These result in different patterns of occupational sex segregation and inequality • Post-Industrialism • Change as dominated by universal dynamics of post-industrial shift, which reinforce occupational sex segregation and ‘gender essentialism’
Varieties of Capitalism • LMEs • Education and training for general skills • Deregulated, individualised labour markets • Short-term orientation to profitability • Social policy emphasis on individual responsibility • CMEs • Education and training for organisation- and industry-specific skills • Coordinated/regulated labour markets • Long-term orientation to governance and profitability • Social policy emphasis on protection and pooling of risk
Feminist Analysis of VOC • CMEs/ specific skills regimes • Expected to have higher levels of occupational sex-segregation • LMEs/ general skills regimes • Expected to have less segregated occupations but higher income inequality • Might speculate therefore that: • gender is a more prominent principle of social division in CMEs? • While class is more prominent in LMEs? • Drivers of change perceived as primarily economic, overlaid on essentialised model of dualistic gender
Feminist Post-Industrialism • Interaction of universalising economic forces of post-industrialism with universalistic gender dualism • Effect is to reinforce occupational segregation • Gender ideology, rather than economics, drives • horizontal segregation between manual (male) and non-manual (female) occupations • and pervasive vertical segregation within occupational hierarchies
Comments on the VOC and Post-Industrial Models • Utility of models emphasising one or two macro-level concepts to explain complexity • Limitations of labour market data over 15 years old when dealing with questions of economic restructuring • Snap shot of occupational segregation at a single time • Focus on occupational categories rather than incorporating industrial sector
Using Data from ILO Labour Market Stats • Less discriminating occupational classification • Problems of different cultural interpretations of the ‘same’ occupational classifications • But allows some longitudinal comparison • And more recent data (1985-2005) • Crude occupational breakdown compensated for to some extent by ability to disaggregate occupation by industrial sector • Descriptive statistics for concentration of men and women in occupations rather than index of segregation
Rationale for Selection of Countries • Sweden and Japan as contrasting examples of CMEs • USA and UK as contrasting examples of LMEs • Likely to share common shift towards services • Since 1985, all have increased proportion of economically active population
Declining Employment in Extractive & Transformative Industries • Growth in economically active population • Alongside decline in proportion of employment in extractive and transformative industries • Japan continues to have the highest proportion of employees in these sectors • now has only 31% in such employment • equivalent to the position of the USA twenty years earlier
Labour Force in Extractive & Transformative Industries • As proportion of employment declined, male-concentration increased • Most noticeable in Japan - women were 35% of employees; now 28%
Labour Force in Services • Japan - men in the majority in services • Sweden - post-industrial shift associated with less female concentration in 2005 than 1985 • No simple relationship between post-industrialism and ‘universal reinforcement’ of sexual divisions
Change in Occupational Structures • Occupational upgrading? • Crude measure shows increasing proportion of workforce employed in managerial, admin, professional, technical and associated occupations in 2004-05 than in mid-1980s/1990s • Combined with gradually decreasing proportion of employees in production jobs (including skilled craft and routine manual work)
Differences in Occupational Concentrations of men and women - LMEs v CMEs?
The Effect of Industrial Sector on Occupational Divisions • Using only 2004/5 data • Excludes Agriculture, Forestry and Fishing • Groups Industrial Sectors into 3: • extractive and transformative • business and finance, real estate and retail services • public and welfare services • Showing % of women in each occupation
Distribution of women in occupations by industry, Sweden, 2004
Distribution of women in occupations by industry, Japan 2005
Occupation by Industry & VOC • No simple relationship between LME policies and lesser concentrations of men and women in segregated occupations • In the UK, barriers to the a-typical sex entering occupations do not seem to be lower than in Sweden • Swedish social-democratic model more effective in facilitating movement of women into career occupations in industry and in private sector services
Continuity of dualistic gender ideologies? • Evidence provides support for the argument that a dualistic, if not ‘essentialist’, gender ideology continues to underpin some universally sex-differentiated occupational patterns • Not the case however that shift to services universally reinforces sex-segregated work • Can conjecture that effects of shift to services differ according to interaction between • cultural, and historically located, processes of gendered power relations • political-economic strategies • equality policies • and the resulting organisation of occupations in different sectors in different countries
Evaluation of Models • Strengths and limitations of a feminist model of VOC • Utility • But over-reliance on macro-structural concepts of skills and gender • Loss of insight into process • Need to integrate income data and inter-dependence of class with gender and ethnic divisions • Skills, and their formation and use, are not independent of power relations, and are in flux in ‘knowledge economies’ • Strengths and limitations of a feminist post-industrialism • Identifies the intransigence of dualistic gender • But a version of convergence theory?
What would a sociological model of the interactions of gender and markets look like? • A situated account of the remaking of gender in the context of new occupational relationships • Gender and markets as mutually constitutive • Organisational level is where inter-relations of markets and personal biographies are worked out: • Occupational positions and skills are constituted • And in their enactment produce the contested strata of class, gender and ethnicity • Which in turn reshape occupations and skills