ABSTRACT
To what extent do women and men who work in different occupations also work in different spaces? Baran and Teegarden (1987:206) propose that occupational
segregation in the insurance industry is ‘tantamount to spatial segregation by gender’ since managers are overwhelmingly male and clerical staff are predominantly female. This section examines the spatial conditions of women’s work and men’s work and proposes that working women and men come into
daily contact with one another very infrequently. Further, women’s jobs can be classified as ‘open floor,’ but men’s jobs are more likely to be ‘closed door.’ That is, women work in a more public environment with less control of their space than
men. This lack of spatial control both reflects and contributes to women’s lower occupational status by limiting opportunities for the transfer of knowledge from men to women.
