ABSTRACT
The historic persistence of sex segregation (Gross 1968; Beller 1984) made women’s dramatic gains during the 1970s in such diverse male occupations as pharmacy, bank management, bartending, and typesetting noteworthy. Why did women disproportionately enter these and a few other male occupations when they made only modest progress in most and lost ground in a few? To answer this question, Patricia Roos and I conducted a two-part study: multivariate analyses of the changing sex composition in all detailed census occupations and in-depth case studies of 14 occupations in which women’s representation increased at least twice as much as it had in the labor force as a whole (see Table 102.1). This chapter draws on those case studies: bank managers (Bird 1990), bartenders (Detman 1990), systems analysts (Donato 1990a), public relations specialists (Donato 1990b), pharmacists (Phipps 1990a), insurance adjusters/examiners (Phipps 1990b), typesetters/compositors (Roos 1990), insurance salespersons (Thomas 1990), real estate salespersons (Thomas and Reskin 1990), bakers (Steiger and Reskin 1990), book editors (Reskin and Roos 1990), print and broadcast reporters, and accountants. 1 Although the case studies revealed that widely different factors precipitated these occupations’ feminization, the process of change can be encompassed in a single perspective—queuing. This chapter begins by outlining the queuing approach. It then shows how the determinants of occupational feminization conformed to queuing processes. Finally, it argues that the queue model as I have developed it offers a structural approach to understanding change in job composition. Percent Females in Feminizing Occupations, 1970, 1980, 1988
Occupation
1970%
1980%
1988%
1970–1988 Increase
Financial managers
19.4
31.4
42.4
23.0
Accountants/auditors
24.6
38.1
49.6
25.0
Operation/systems analysts
11.1
27.7
39.6
28.5
Pharmacists
12.1
24.0
31.9
19.8
Public relations specialists
26.6
48.8
59.1
32.5
Editors and reporters
41.6
49.3
n.a.
n.a.
Insurance sales
12.9
25.4
29.7
16.8
Real estate sales
31.2
45.2
48.5
17.3
Insurance adjusters/examiners
29.6
60.2
72.2
42.6
Bartenders
21.2
44.3
49.6
28.4
Bakers
25.4
40.7
47.8
22.4
Bus Drivers
28.3
45.8
48.5
20.2
Typesetters/compositors
16.8
55.7
73.9
57.1
Labor force
38.0
42.6
45.0
7.0
