ABSTRACT
Patricia Roos and the author conducts 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. This chapter draws on those case studies: bank managers, bartenders, systems analysts, public relations specialists, pharmacists, insurance adjusters/examiners, typesetters/compositors, insurance salespersons, real estate salespersons, bakers, book editors, print and broadcast reporters, and accountants. It shows how the determinants of occupational feminization conformed to queuing processes. The chapter argues that the queue model as developed it offers a structural approach to understanding change in job composition. A queuing perspective views labor markets as composed of labor queues and job queues that reflect, respectively, employers' ranking of possible workers and workers' ranking of jobs. Queuing emphasizes how employers rank groups of potential workers as well as how workers rank jobs.
