Early in the 1980s the media took notice of a new phenomenon: women’s marked progress into occupations traditionally reserved for men. Commenting on newly published data from the Department of Labor and the Bureau of the Census, media accounts such as Frank Prial’s were quick to portray women’s gains in “men’s” occupations as dramatic:

An increasing number of women in the United States are working at what used to be men’s jobs. Despite the unemployment rate, the number of women working [for wages] in the United States has risen 21 million, or 95 percent, over the last two decades, according...

What led to the feminization of the customarily male occupations our research team studied? In answering that question, this chapter develops a theoretical model of occupational feminization. We begin our task by outlining a model of occupational composition that accounts for the uneven distribution of groups across occupations and hence, specifically, how occupations’ sex compositions change. The most fruitful model sees occupational composition as the result of adual-queueingprocess:labor queuesorder groups of workers in terms of their attractiveness to employers, andjob queuesrank jobs in terms of their attractiveness to workers.¹ Identifying how and why employers...

To what extent has desegregation yielded occupational and economic opportunities for women? This chapter focuses on the two parts of that question. First, did women benefit occupationally from moving into the desegregating occupations we studied? In other words, did occupational-level desegregation translate into sex integration at the level of jobs, or did sex segregation persist within these nominally desegregated occupations?¹ Second, did occupational-level desegregation reduce the earnings gap between men and women within these occupations? Obviously, the answer to the second question depends on the first: if women experienced genuine occupational integration, their progress toward economic equity would be greatly...

For centuries book editing was a “gentlemen’s profession” (Tebbel, 1972: 207), yet in the 1970s women made such large gains in the occupation that some have speculated that editing is becoming a women’s ghetto (Geracimos, 1974:25). How can we explain women’s gains? This chapter examines the changes in the publishing industry and the editorial role that have led to women’s increasing representation among editors.

Culture and commerce, art and business—these disparate concerns shaped the book publishing industry (Coser et al., 1982). Its origins in medieval monasteries and universities (Dessauer, 1974:2) bestowed on publishing a special status. As literature and...

Women’s representation in pharmacy has increased dramatically over the past few decades. In 1950 and 1960 women accounted for approximately 8 percent of all pharmacists (see Table 5.1). Between 1970 and 1980 their representation rose from 12 to 24 percent. Overall, the occupation itself grew 31 percent, from about 1l0,000 pharmacists in 1970 to more than 143,000 in 1980. This represented a net growth of some 21,000 women pharmacists compared with men’s increase of more than 12,000. Thus, by 1980 there were about 34,000 women and 109,000 men practicing pharmacy. By 1988, women constituted 32 percent of all pharmacists (U.S....

The tasks of public relations specialists are many. To manage public opinion, practitioners may write newsletters and speeches, lobby for organizational interests, collect news items about corporations, organize media and fund-raising events, and inform the public about corporate activities. Interestingly, many women have become the visible actors who convey their employers’ image. For example, when theChallengerspace shuttle disaster occurred in 1986, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) turned to a woman to handle the subsequent media pandemonium. The Long Island Lighting Company hired a woman as its major spokesperson to respond to politicians, activists, and residents who...

Women have worked in banking since early in the century, but their numbers did not become large until the 1940s, when banking began relying on women to fill clerical positions (Shulsky, 1951). By 1970 women constituted two-thirds of the workforce in banking, but most of them held clerical positions: for example, 86 percent of the tellers were women (Strober and Arnold, 1987a). The few women managers were concentrated in retail banking, which emphasized consumer relations; male managers dominated higher-status positions as officers and executives. In the 1970s, an increase of 738, 107 nearly doubled the number of women working in...

Since 1960 the use of computers has increased tremendously, and computer occupations have grown apace. Because of advances in computer technology, the expanding use of electronic data-processing systems, and the proliferation of computer centers that serve individual clients (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1970, 1974b, 1984b), the number of systems analysts increased by 88 percent between 1970 and 1980 (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1984a). Operations and systems researchers and analysts increased by a more modest 24 percent.

Because computer occupations do not have a legacy of sex segregation and because they are experiencing rapid growth, one might expect women...

Throughout this century women’s representation among insurance agents and brokers has varied with the socioeconomic conditions of the nation. Between 1910 and 1930, when women were struggling for suffrage and economic opportunity, the proportion of women selling life insurance increased more than fivefold (see Table 9.1). Indeed, before 1920 an insurance executive recruited high school girls to insurance sales, assuring them that it offered the “surest as well as the most convenient means of providing for an old age” (Kessler-Harris, 1982:227). However, the Depression of the 1930s reduced women’s opportunities, and the proportion of women in the occupation increased only...

Between 1960 and 1980 the real estate industry experienced nearly continuous growth. As Table 10.1 shows, the number of jobs increased steadily after 1960 until employment peaked in 1980 with 1,384,000 jobs. In the recession years of 1981 and 1982, the industry lost jobs (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1984a).

A similar pattern of growth occurred among real estate sales occupations, those of real estate salespersons and brokers, appraisers, sales superintendents, building consultants, and leasing agents (U. S. Department of Commerce, Office of Federal Statistical Policy and Standards, 1980). Between 1972 and 1979 the employment of real estate salespersons and...

Women’s participation in the insurance industry increased during the 1970s. However, women’s headway in such male-dominated specialties as under-writing and sales was far outstripped by their gains in the historically male-dominated clerical occupation of adjusters, examiners, and investigators. When the census first classified adjusters, examiners, and investigators as a detailed occupational category in 1960, 6,845 women made up 12 percent of the more than 55,000 occupational incumbents (see Table 11.1). By 1970 the occupation had added some 40,000 new jobs, almost half of which were filled by women. As a result, the number of women quadrupled, and they constituted almost...

Historically, men have dominated bartending. Ethnographic accounts from as recently as 1975 characterized bartenders as authoritarian, tough, strong, and male. Bartenders were thought to “represent a stronghold of masculinity and authority” (Spradley and Mann, 1975:71). Novels and motion pictures have long depicted bars as dark, smoky rooms that are loud and dangerous, sometimes fronts for drug dealing, prostitution, and other illicit activities. “Bars in America are not as much deviant settings as they are places of potential deviant activity” (Cavan, 1966:37)—in short, not the kind of place a “self-respecting lady” would seek employment. Nonetheless, women have long worked in...

Picture a baker. Do you see the nursery-rhyme baker—a portly man in a chef’s hat, crowded in a tub with his cronies the butcher and the candlestick maker—or the media cliché of the apron-clad wife and mother, pulling home-baked cookies and bread from the oven? When by “baker” we mean people whoearntheir bread by baking it, Mother Goose is closer to the mark than Madison Avenue. Over the centuries in which baking has been an occupation, men have dominated it (Laslett, 1965). Indeed, as in most guild-organized crafts, women were often formally barred (Thrupp, 1933; Clark,...

Printers were once the quintessential craft workers, the aristocracy of the blue-collar workforce, according to Lipset et at. (1956). They were better educated than the average production worker, and the International Typographical Union (ITV) assured them high income, job autonomy, and occupational community. These printers were also invariably men. Women were singularly unsuccessful in integrating the hot-metal composing room, where the operators typeset and composed the final printed layout, or the apprenticeship programs leading to these well-paid jobs.

Since 1970, however, the print production process and its workforce have changed dramatically. Extraordinary technological advances revolutionized typesetting, and as a consequence...

Although researchers disagree over the causes of sex segregation in the workplace, they agree on its pervasiveness and persistence. Between 1900 and 1970 the extent of occupational-level sex segregation fluctuated only slightly (Gross, 1968; Jacobs, 1989b). Of course, aggregate-level stability in the extent of segregation can conceal infrequent shifts in the sex makeup of particular occupations, but as Chapter 1 showed, such changes have been rare. Indeed, it was the historical stability in occupations’ sex composition that drew our attention to women’s marked inroads during the 1970s into such diverse male occupations as pharmacist, typesetter, and bus driver.

The statistical...