ABSTRACT
European labour markets, in common with most other economies, are highly sex segregated (Anker 1998; Hakim 1992; Watts and Rich 1993; Rubery and Fagan 1993). This is despite a decline in segregation in recent decades, and more generally this century, according to available data series, although some studies suggest a greater degree of change (Anker 1998; Hakim 1981) than others (Blackburn et al. 1993). In European economies where a relatively high proportion of jobs are filled by women, this usually coincides with high rather than low levels of sex segregation, thus providing little ground for optimism that further entry of women into the wage economy will in itself bring about the desegregation of the labour market, one of the key objectives of both the third and the fourth action programmes for equal opportunities.
