ABSTRACT
This chapter is an effort to understand why women do “women’s work.” In 1985, over two-thirds of the women in the U.S. civilian labor force worked in occupations that were 70 percent or more female. 1 The study of women’s work has attracted scholars from many disciplines, from psychology (Gutek, 1985) to history (Kessler-Harris, 1982) to anthropology (Sanday, 1981) to economics (Bergmann, 1986) to sociology (Reskin, 1984). A flurry of recent papers has addressed such topics as trends in occupational segregation (Bianchi and Rytina, 1986; Jacobs, 1986), sex segregation among teenagers in the workplace (Greenberger and Steinberg, 1983), and sex segregation within voluntary organizations (McPherson and Smith-Lovin, 1986), between industries (Tienda, Smith, and Ortiz, 1987), across cities (Abrahamson and Sigelman, 1987), and within firms (Bielby and Baron, 1986). (See Reskin and Hartmann, 1985, for discussion of sex segregation in the workplace.)
