ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces issues raised by the conceptual status of “gender” in attempts to explain women’s and men’s employment experience. Difficulties in explanations of employment direct attention to the way in which central concerns are conceptualized. Many current explanations isolate aggregate differences between women's and men's employment and address these as the major object of explanation. Explanations of relations to employment in terms of the positions and identities associated with gender divisions are a case in point. Tracing the development of the disenchantment with the reserve army of labour as a means of explanation demonstrates the need to specify gender categories and gender divisions in explanations of employment, and to take their precise meaning as a problem to be addressed. The focus of currently favoured explanations is occupational segregation by sex, and many discussions of this phenomenon reproduce the problematic form of gender formulations that led eventually to the dissatisfaction with the reserve army of labour concept.
