ABSTRACT
The case study of “occupational segregation by sex” that forms the core of the research has proved to be a useful vantage point for the assessment of the salience and substance of variations within and between women’s and men’s experiences of domestic and employment relations. The “men’s job” on the night telephonist shift involves performing the same tasks with the same technology as the “women’s job” on the day shift. Although in terms of numerical dominance the postal job and the night telephonist job were “men’s jobs” and the day telephonist job was a “woman’s job”, the social circumstances of job incumbents were encompassed by a gender distinction in any straightforward way. The clarification of processes producing occupational gender segregation is a prerequisite to finding the answer to another question explored in some detail in this study: the relationship between segregation and stratification.
