ABSTRACT

Research that considers the experience of women in the paid workforce is fairly recent and reflects the unprecedented influx, since the 1960s, of middleclass women into the labour market. Women's workforce participation has doubled in the last twenty-five to thirty years, and now six out of every ten women in North America are in the paid labour force (Spain and Bianchi, 1996; Statistics Canada, 1995). Despite inroads into traditionally maledominated fields such as medicine and law, women are still predominantly confined to lower-level positions and to female sub-specialities (Acker, 1992). Moreover, three-quarters of all employed women are in teaching, health, clerical, or sales and service jobs and are disproportionately represented in low-status, low-paid, dead-end jobs (Gutek, 1993; Jacobsen, 1994).