Women in the Economy: A Sociological Study

 

Women in the Economy: A Sociological Study

Gaurang R. Sahay

Economic sociology has been traditionally hesitant in paying enough attention to the topic of relationship between women and the economy. It has been pointed out that a subtle gender bias may have forced it to focus more on male dominated formal economic organizations and behaviour like market and consumerism and exclude gender-based economic behaviour including household behavior and the paid care sector from the concerns of economic sociology. Milkman and Townsley remark,

Economic sociology as a field has yet to be truly sensitized to the gender dimension of economic life. The recent flurry of attention to the Polanyian concept of embeddedness, which has striking gender implications, has yet to persuade most sociologists of the economy to seriously integrate gender concerns into their analyses. Gender-centered research, although plentiful, remains essentially ghettoized and ignored by the mainstream. (614)

Zelizer (2002) also argues that economic sociology still have a narrow view, and suggests that gender bias may produce the exclusion of the household from the boundaries of economic sociology.

Exclusion of gender-based economic behaviour from the scope of economic sociology proved to be the detriment of economic sociology in several ways. Analyses of the economy, which at best are thought to be applicable to the behaviour of males, have been presented as valid for both sexes, and a set of information on the economic situation of women has been ignored. In this, economic sociology is no different from other disciplines or other fields in sociology which have all developed with a distinct male bias. But it is also important to stress that by excluding women from the scientific analysis of how the economy functions, a fine opportunity has been missed to show that the economy can indeed be understood primarily as a social enterprise. If there is one area where one needs a sociological perspective to explain the way the economy really works, it pertains to the situation of women in the economy. One reason for this has to do with the fact that the task to implant the economy has fallen largely on women. It is women who educate and socialise the children, take care of the old and sick who cannot work, and in general make it possible for the males to go to work the next day. Another reason for the importance of studies of women’s role in the economy is that women’s participation in the official economy cannot be understood in terms of the internal workings of the market; one also has to look at such factors as the structure of the family, demographic changes, broad economic developments, and women’s behaviour over the life-cycle, if one is to get close to an adequate explanation. The optical illusion of a market system which considers that it works by itself and is understandable exclusively in monetary terms is thus based on the necessary unfounded assumption that women’s work — in the home as well as in the workplace — remains invisible, poorly understood and thus unimportant. Added to this the documented prevalence of a sexual division of labour in all human societies, and the insufficiency of any approach which does not look at the role that gender plays in the economy make gender-based economic behaviour an important topic for research and explanation in economic sociology.

The importance of studies of women in the economy is also due to the fact that women all over the world play a crucial role in the economy. This is made clear by the contents of a publication issued in connection with the third UN Conference on Women in July 1985. To quote it:

Women carry out two thirds of all work in the world, get one tenth of the income, and own less than one percent of alI wealth ... The contribution that women make in their work is underestimated all over the world. Here [in Sweden] women take care of other people’s children, do housecleaning and perform similar tasks outside the home, which do not show up in the statistics. In most African countries it is women who take care of food production through unpaid, agricultural work. Women all over the world are in addition responsible for the children and perform labour in the home. The urbanization process, which is going on in most countries, has as a consequence that women also must increasingly assume responsibility for everyday life while the males continue to hold economic and political power. Around 30 percent of all households in the world — in certain parts of Africa the figure is close to 70 percent — are today headed by women. (418)

Apart from the visible role of women in the economy, lowering birth rates, increasing divorce rate, increasing rate of joining the official labour force by women, feminisation of poverty, etc. have affected the status of women in economy. Therefore, economic sociology is required to adequately research these phenomena.

From 1980s onwards, new economic sociology has taken up the issue of women in the economy in an earnest way. Accordingly, the relationship between gender and economy has lately become an important topic for research in new economic sociology. This process started with a critique of the ‘economy and society’ paradigm in studies of women in the economy from 1970s.

‘Economy and Society’ Paradigm: A Critique

Mainstream sociology between World War II and the early 1970s hardly paid attention to the relationship between women and economy. The tendency was to exclude women as an independent object of study but to study them only within the context of the family. In Wilbert E. Moore’s well-known pamphlet Economy and Society the word ‘women’ is not once mentioned. In Parsons and Smelser’s work with the same title, there are a few stray references to women from which it is clear that women are not of much interest when one analyses the economic ‘sub-system’. Neil Smelser’s popular textbook The Sociology of Economic Life has a similar approach. It has discussed women very minimally in the sections on ‘kinship groupings’ and ‘differentiation of family activities’.

It is to the sociology of the family and not to the works which deal directly with the economy that one has to turn in order to find out how mainstream sociology before the 1970s perceived the relationship between economy and women. The picture that emerges from these studies is the following. Women are primarily in contact with the economy through the mediation of men — through their husbands who work in the economy and through their male children who will one day be doing the same. The reason for the ‘role differentiation’ within the family is that it comes naturally to men to play the ‘instrumental’ role and for women to play the ‘expressive’ one. Being sharply separated, these two roles help the family to fulfill its most important social function: to help integrate society. The exigencies of ‘the social system’ thus explain why there is one ‘occupational’ role and one ‘domestic’ role within the family. The following famous quote, which is from Talcott Parsons’ article ‘Age and Sex in the Social Structure of the United States’, summarizes much of the attitude of mainstream sociology:

‘The woman’s fundamental status is that of her husband’s wife, the mother of his children, and traditionally the person responsible for a complex of activities in connection with the management of the household, care of children, etc.’.

In the 1970s the idea that women could only be studied within the context of the family was widely criticized, and Parsons’ work was especially singled out for criticism. The main argument was that in order to understand the position of women, it was necessary to go beyond the family and look at larger, structural forces, such as the politico-economy. The argument that provoked discussion in feminist social science circles was propounded by scholars like Margaret Benston who claimed that ‘the roots of the secondary status of women in society are in fact economic’; Heidi Hartmann argued that ‘the roots of women’s present social status lie in the sex-ordered division of labour’; and Gayle Rubin suggested that to get a grip on the ‘sex/gender system’ one has to ‘recognize the mutual inter-dependence of sexuality, economics, and politics’.

When efforts were made to look at the way in which these larger structures affect the lives of women, it soon became apparent that mainstream sociology had ignored the role of women in its studies particularly stratification studies, modernization studies, and industrial studies. Jessie Bernard noted that in Blau and Duncan’s famous study The American Occupational Structure (1967) ‘the two-fifths of the labour force constituted by women are excluded. Women only appear (in chapter 10) as contributors to husbands’ careers’. Joan Acker took an inventory of stratification studies, and the conclusion she reached is clear from the subtitle to her famous article in 1973, ‘A Case of Intellectual Sexism’. The situation within modernization theory was not very different. In an often-quoted review of the award-winning Becoming Modern (1974) by Alex Inkeles and David Horton Smith, Hanna Papanek observed that ‘the authors deal only with the process of making men modern’ and emphasized that this ‘raises questions about many aspects of their study’. Reviewing research by mainstream sociologists on Latin America from the 1950s to the early-1970s, June Nash concluded that ‘the differential impact of modernization has not been noted until recently because women have not been part of the interviewing sample, nor have they been senior investigators of the problem’. An examination of industrial sociology gave a similar result. Ann Oakley thus found that ‘women are conspicuous for their absence as data in the sociology of industry and work’ and cited Robert Blauner’s Alienation and Freedom (1964) as an example. According to Oakley: ‘the conventional sociological approach to housework could be termed ‘sexist’: it has treated housework merely as an aspect of the feminine role in the family — as a part of women’s role in marriage, or as a dimension of child-rearing — not as a work role. The study of housework as work is entirely missing from sociology.’

The Dialogue in Women’s Studies about Economy, Economists and Gender

Because of a growing interest in the relationship between women and economy in economic sociology a critique was made to neoclassical economic studies. Francine D. Blau and Carol L. Jusenius’ ‘Economists’ Approaches to Sex Segregation in the Labor Market’, which appeared in 1976 in an issue of Signs is devoted to the implications of occupational segregation. The authors carefully examine three versions of neoclassical economics which have been used to explain sex segregation — the overcrowding approach, the human capital approach, and the monopsony model — and point out that each approach shows that ‘the neoclassical economics has generated a number of plausible explanations for the male-female pay differential’ (1976: 189). However, in all three of them, the neoclassical argument has not sufficiently accounted for sex segregation. In the authors’ opinion this makes it preferable to choose a different theoretical approach. They conclude: ‘sex segregation is far from a necessary outcome in these models, and the factors which are identified as causes of pay differentials are not persuasive as causes of sex segregation within the neoclassical model. A major problem in the neoclassical models is that wage rate is not considered as a sufficient cause of segregation. This also implies that segregation would be an unlikely outcome in a world for which the neoclassical models are a reasonably accurate description. (1976: 189—90)

Kenneth Arrow (pp. 233 —7) expresses some misgivings in the same issue about this study. According to Arrow, ‘economic arguments of all schools deal with anonymous individuals. The characteristics of sex, race and nation are not incorporated. It may not be totally surprising that economic theories have nothing to say about the causes of sexual, racial, or national differences’.

However, as an example of the attempt to show that mainstream economics is not as one-dimensional as it is depicted by Arrow, one can cite Carolyn Shaw Bell’s ‘Women and Work: An Economic Appraisal’. Bell discusses such issues as exclusion of household work in GNP and the difficulty involved in imputing a price to women’s work in the home in economic studies, and she also notes that many economists have been aware of these problems for a long time. As a further example, one can point to the article by Elaine McCrate in Signs in which she emphasizes that Gary Becker’s argument about women’s economic position can be rejected on the ground that it is rooted in biological and not in economic reasoning.

Besides, feminist sociologists are critical of neoclassical economics because it emphasizes that sex-based discrimination would erode in competitive markets. There are two types of segregation-encouraging actions of employers that neoclassical economists have considered. The first is policies that have a disparate impact by sex but get more productive workers. They do not see such policies as discriminatry at all, since they define discrimination in terms of treating equally productive workers differently. Secondly, neoclassical economists believe that different gender groups differ in average productivity. The statistical data find men more productive. The employers use averages formed by informal or formal data-gathering to make predictions about individuals. They then treat men more favorably. In economists’ thinking, this differential treatment create roughly the degree of pay gap between men and women that is commensurate with the average productivity gap. Most economists explain that work experience entails learning and thus increased productivity, and it is the increased productivity that explains the higher pay. The sex gap in pay is explained largely by women’s childrearing responsibilities which creates an experience gap. Sociologists argue that while biology undoubtedly affects this (women delivering a child and breast-feed), norms also have a powerful role. Sex-segregated networks encourage women’s domestic and men’s employment interests as well.

Whatever the causes of segregation, it is linked to the pay gap because predominantly female jobs pay less, on average, than predominantly male jobs. But why do women’s jobs pay less? Economic sociologists argue that it is mysterious at first glance because women’s jobs cover the full range of educational requirements, and require about as much cognitive skill as men’s, on average. Besides, women are not concentrated in menial jobs. They believe that part of the reason for the higher pay of predominantly male jobs is the existing authority structure controlled by men (England 1992; Wright, Baxter, and Gunn 1995).

Economists have provided two different explanations for the lower pay of occupations with a high percentage of female workers. The first is called the principle of “compensating differentials.” The idea is that women care more about avoiding physical danger, and try to have mother-friendly work conditions in their occupations than men, while men focus more on maximizing earnings. That is why men are compensated with higher wage. A second economic explanation for the lower pay in female jobs is crowding. Bergmann (1974,1986) argues that women’s jobs pay less because they are “crowded.” In this view, women seeking to enter male occupations face sex discrimination in hiring, leading to a supply of applicants for traditionally female jobs that is larger than it would be in the absence of hiring discrimination, as women denied entrance to male jobs crowd the female jobs. This “excess” supply lowers wages in female jobs.

Sociologists have critiqued economics thesis by developing a devaluation thesis that claim that the difference between the pay of the two jobs results from gender bias in wage setting rather than from other factors about the jobs. The evidence for the devaluation view is the finding that the sex composition of an occupation or job exerts a net effect on its wage level. Such effects of sex composition have led some researchers to conclude that employers set lower wages when jobs are filled largely by women. Sociologists argue that cultural ideas deprecate work done by women, and cultural beliefs lead to cognitive errors in which decision makers underestimate the contribution of female jobs to organizational goals, including the goal of increasing profits through increasing productivity. Once wage scales are set up, the disparities are perpetuated by organizational inertia in the form of using past wages within the organization to set present wages, or the use of market surveys of wages in other firms to set jobs’ pay levels. That is, wage scales get “institutionalized.”

One example of the devaluation of women’s work is the devaluation of care work—such as child care, teaching, health care service provision, counseling, and so forth (Cancian and Oliker 2000; Folbre and Nelson 2000). Care work pays less than other work requiring the same amount of skill, effort, and risk (England and Folbre 1999; England, Budig, and Folbre 2002). One cultural explanation of the devaluation of care sees it as part of the more general devaluation of women’s work; cultural schema see women’s care as the air we breathe—priceless, but invisible, to be taken for granted, thus not really valued.

New Economic Sociology, Women and Economy

By the end of the 1970s and the early-1980s the absence of studies of women in industrial sociology, stratification studies, and modernization theory was on its way to being corrected. It had by this time been established in stratification studies that a high and stable degree of sex segregation existed in many societies. A series of sophisticated measures had also been devised for studying this phenomenon. In the sociology of work, the methods of industrial sociology had been extended to housework. A number of studies were also made of women in male-dominated jobs, including that of the economic profession.

Work on women’s economic position in a variety of developing countries has become more common. A good introduction to some of this work can be found in the two thematic issues that Signs devoted to women and development in 1977 and 1981. These two volumes contain general reflections on recent developments in the field by the two pioneers Ester Boserup and Hanna Papanek as well as representative samples of recent scholarship, such as Norma Chinchilla’s work on the impact of monopoly capitalism on women in Guatemala and Deniz Kandiyoti’s studies of how socio-economic changes in Turkey have affected the female population.

There has also been rapid and interesting development in theoretical contributions to the study of women in the economy. The two most popular theoretical concepts are probably ‘patriarchy’ and ‘reproduction’. The former, which can be defined in a variety of ways, basically denotes male or male-like domination. Its value for economic sociology resides, among many things, in the fact that it can be used to correct theoretical perspectives with a sexist bias. Examples of this include some feminist-Marxist studies such as those in Zillah Eisenstein’s collection Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism. In general, patriarchy is a key concept in explaining women’s position in the labour market.

According to Michele Barrett the concept of ‘reproduction’ has ‘in recent years been used as a crucial mechanism for relating women’s oppression to the organization of production’ and is of great relevance to economic sociology. One definition of 'reproduction’ that seems particularly fruitful is that of Harriet Holter, who defines it as ‘the production, care and maintenance of human beings’. In this version ‘reproduction’ can be tied to the notion that the official market economy is unable to function without the work that by tradition is carried out by women. Holter’s definition, it should be noted, is also connected to the concept of ‘care-giving work’, which Norwegian sociologists in particular have developed. The general idea is that many forms of female work have a dynamic which is different from that of male work. It is less instrumental and more geared towards the needs of the other, be it a child, a handicapped person or someone who is sick. An interesting discussion of the specific kind of rationality that is characteristic of female social action has also started in Norway. In her widely discussed article ‘The Responsibility of Women: On Goals and Means in the Thoughts of Women’, Bjorg Aase Sorensen attempts to explain the resistance of female workers in a factory to the introduction of fixed wages. Her explanation is centred on the differences and conflicts that she finds between the ‘two systems of rationality’ that exist in society: one is characteristic of males and is a form of ‘technical, narrow rationality’, whereas the other is common among women. According to the latter system, it is rational to feel responsible for ‘the way resources or needs are administered’.

New economic sociology has made a number of studies of occupational sex segregation. It has been reported that as women have entered paid employment, most have gone into predominantly female occupations (Reskin and Roos 1990; Reskin 1993). The labor market has been extensively sex segregated, with men predominating in upper management and the most prestigious professions. Women have numerically dominated professions such as nursing, teaching, and librarianship. Nonprofessional but white-collar occupations of clerical and retail sales work have been largely done by women, as have manufacturing jobs in nondurable-goods industries (e.g. electronics, garments), and domestic work and child care. Though occupational sex segregation has started declining in recent years, it has happened more in managerial and professional white-collar areas than in other jobs (Jacobs 2003).

Various methodological concepts such as social networks or social capital, culture or social norms and institutions and rational choice have been used in economic sociology to explain the causes that perpetuate occupational sex segregation.

Social Networks or Social Capital and Occupational Sex Segregation

Smith-Lovin and McPherson’s (1993) version of network theory claims that there is a tendency among people to seek out or be attracted towards those who are similar to themselves. This is called homophily. Homophily by gender in early ties to playmates leads boys and girls to move into sex differentiated network locations early in life. Women’s networks have a higher proportion of kin in them. Women belong to fewer and smaller voluntary organizations. These network connections encourage later network ties to be sex differentiated. These sex differentiated network locations, both affecting and affected by women’s child-rearing responsibilities, push women into more kin-related and men into more occupationally relevant networks. Even when job information is exchanged in female networks, it is likely to be about female-typical courses, majors, interests, and occupations. The network perspective emphasizes how kin-centered networks might encourage women to feel more responsibility for household work. Of course, it is also likely that kin-centered networks are a consequence of the cultural construction of women as responsible for child care.

Burt (2002) provides some evidence from corporate data that strong, multiplex ties benefit professional or managerial women more than “weak” ties, whereas the opposite is true for men. He interprets this result to mean that low-status individuals like women need strong ties to get past the suspicion of their incompetence or untrustworthiness. (Ibarra 2001) Open recruitment methods are associated with women holding a greater share of management jobs, while recruitment through informal networks increases men’s share. Formalizing personnel practices also reduces men’s share, presumably because it lessens ascription in hiring or job assignments.

Culture, Social Norms, Institutions and Occupational Sex Segregation

Cultural arguments about sex-based segregation in jobs usually take the form of ‘socialization’ arguments. The simplest version is that the process of cultural transmission through socialisation creates different preferences, interests, and aspirations in males and females. These differences then lead to training for, and applying for, different jobs. Though there is evidence in favor of this pattern; males and females aspire to very different jobs from very early ages and choose different courses of study in educational institutions, the differences have started diminishing in recent years (Marini and Brinton 1984; Marini and Fan 1997).

However, there are some studies that claim that early occupational aspirations have a weak effect on the sex composition of the occupation attained (Okamoto and England 1999). It is unclear whether preferences consistent with broader cultural norms are internalized deeply or whether they respond flexibly to changes in individuals’ social networks or structural positions. Jacobs (1989, 1999, 2001) has argued that early socialization is clearly not the whole story, pointing to the instability of many individuals’ job aspirations and choices as they move through the life cycle. That is, correlations between the sex composition of the job aspired to and held at are surprisingly small. Jacobs argues that, given this instability, some social forces must keep pushing women back into female, and male back into male, spheres; early socialization is not a sufficient factor.

Jacobs’s (1989) view, minimizing the role of socialization, has been the popular view among sociologists of gender (Epstein 1988; Aries 1996; Ridgeway and Smith-Lovin 1999; Reskin and Roos 1990; Bielby and Bielby 2002). Socialization or cultural views are very unpopular among sociologists of gender because they “blame the victim” and can be used against attempts to get employers to stop discriminating. It seems to be saying that women want what they get or get what they want. Social psychologists’ research on what they call “fundamental attribution error,” does provide one scientific reason to think that most people revert to explanations that exaggerate the role of internalized preferences and skills while forgetting about the shaping role of social pressures and other constraints and incentives in the context in which the individual operates.

Ethnomethodology to gender or the ‘doing gender’ framework believe that women wear women’s clothes, care for their families, and choose womanly jobs not so much because they believe in the “rightness” of the choices, or out of fear of reprisals, but because, if they do not, their actions will simply not make any sense to others. That each of us is held accountable is an external constraint, but the norms people are holding each other accountable for are assumed to be internalized. They are not preferences for one’s own behavior, but beliefs about what self and others are expected to do to make sense. The ‘doing gender’ interpretation is that women’s employment is now acceptable, but men are supposed to be the main breadwinners, and not to earn less than their wives. The more men are in this situation, unable to display male gender, Brines argues that they are unwilling to do housework or their wives disinclined to push them to do what would ‘feminize’ them even more. Thus this view does assume that something is internalized. Moreover, most of the evidence offered for the ethnomethodology to gender or ‘doing gender’ view seems to us to be equally consistent with a notion of internalized values or practices.

Beliefs consistent with gender-related cultural norms affect the behavior of decision makers who control hiring as well as workers selecting jobs. Norms about the appropriate sex for jobs may contribute powerfully to occupation sex segregation. For example, consider the possibility that employers believe that it is important that child care workers be women because they fear that any men who would want to do such work are sexually predatory. Or they may assume that men are better at construction work and thus prefer men for these jobs. Or some employers may think that it is simply unseemly to have women negotiating contracts. Such beliefs would undoubtedly affect hiring in these jobs. These are all examples of culture affecting segregation. In addition, workers may hold such gendered beliefs. This may lead to some degree of harassment of women in men’s jobs. Besides, institutional rules, formal and informal, used in hiring or screening for many jobs were developed when few women were employed that makes the rules unfavourable for women.

Rational Choice Explanations and Occupational Sex Segregation

There are some scholars who have used rational choice method to explain why men and women after getting the same amount of education, as it has happened in particularly developed countries, choose different fields of work. It is hard to imagine any money-related motive that would lead women to choose ‘female’ occupations, since they are paid less doing female occupations. Polachek (1981, 1984) argued that differences in men’s and women’s initial plans for continuity of employment lead to different job choices. Since more women than men plan breaks in occupational career for homemaking, they may choose jobs that have low depreciation of human capital during years away from the job, and thus a lower drop in wage when one returns from a stint of home time. Polachek provided evidence for this thesis using broad occupational categories. A related argument is that jobs offering formal or informal on-the-job training will have lower starting wages (i.e., employers charge employees for some of their training costs) but steeper wage trajectories with seniority. If this is true, those who plan to drop out of employment for child rearing would be more likely to choose jobs with higher starting wages but less steep wage trajectories since doing so would optimize income if they planned to drop out soon. This is what is generating occupation sex segregation.

Three Sociological Studies of Women in the Economy

Now economic sociology contains many significant sociological studies of women in the economy. Three highly discussed studies are: Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s Men and Women of the Corporatton (1977), Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott’s Women, Work, and Family (1978), and Paula England and George Farkas’ Households, Employment, and Gender (1986). My selection of these studies is meant to give an idea of the high quality of research that characterizes many contemporary studies of women in the economy than to imply that other, equally interesting and sophisticated studies, do not exist.

Men and Women of the Corporation is an ethnographical study of a US multinational corporation (‘Indsco’), executed in the manner of the Chicago School. The main thrust of the analysis is to show that differences in the work behaviour of men and women can be explained through the way jobs are structured in the workplace. The author explains:

Differences based on sex retreat into the background as the people-creating, behavior-shaping properties of organizational locations become clear. Findings about the ‘typical’ behavior of women in organizations that have been assumed to reflect either biologically based psychological attributes or characteristics developed through a long socialization to a ‘female sex role’ turn out to reflect very reasonable — and very universal — responses to current organizational situations. Even discrimination itself emerges as a consequence of organizational pressures as much as individual prejudice. Thus, specific attention to women as well as men is one way to demonstrate the utility of the perspective that ‘the job makes the person’.

Kanter then proceeds to analyse a series of different roles in or around ‘Indsco’ — managers, secretaries, and wives — with the help of three key variables: ‘opportunity’, ‘power’, and ‘relative number’. How each of these affects people in the organization is summarized in chapter 9 where the author suggests, for example, that people with few opportunities ‘limit their aspirations’, ‘have lower self-esteem’, ‘seek satisfaction in activities outside of work’, and so on.

Of special interest from the viewpoint of women in the economy is naturally Kanter’s handling of the way women behave in ‘Indsco’, the sociological ingenuity that she displays also goes a long way to explain the work behaviour of males. As an example of this, one can take Kanter’s analysis of why there is such resistance in huge corporations to women in managerial positions. This is explained with the help of two concepts which are very useful to economic sociology, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘trust’. Kanter suggests that in the development of the modern corporation there have been periods of high uncertainty, and that they have been countered by owners and managers through a series of measures which reduce the uncertainty with the help of ‘trust’. People are picked for managerial positions only if they have homogenous backgrounds, show conformity in dress and speech, and so on. People who are ‘different’ are weeded out. Women, Kanter suggests, have been seen as unpredictable and incomprehensible by males and have therefore been excluded from management.

The single, most famous analysis in Men and Women of the Corporation concerns the case where women constitute a very small proportion of a work group (‘tokens’). This situation obtains when women constitute 15 percent or less of a job category, and this leads to women being treated as representatives of a social category — as stand-ins for other women — rather than as individuals. ‘Tokens’, the author argues, are very easy to stereotype; they have to live in the limelight, and are under constant pressure to perform, Kanter’s analysis has led to several studies where some of her hypotheses are statistically tested.

Women, Work, and Family by Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott is very different in character from Men and Women of the Corporation. Its topic is the way work has changed for working class women in England and France between 1700 and 1950. The study draws on works in economics, demography and history, but the authors also did archival research and mainly use aggregate description and statistics.

Tilly and Scott’s study makes two major contributions to the understanding of women’s role in the economy. First, they show that the industrial revolution did not bring about as drastic a change in women’s work as is commonly thought. There is, instead, a distinct continuity between the work women have done before, during and after the industrial revolution:

The aggregate view indicates that industrialization did not change the type of work women did, nor did it greatly increase the amount of time that women in the aggregate devoted to productive work for market exchange. Indeed over the course of the nineteenth century, women’s work-force participation varied very little. Early industrialization did concentrate some women in factories, but the majority of working women remained in household settings, as family farm workers, shopkeepers, and servants in France, as servants in Britain, as garment workers and casual laborers in both countries. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century in England and in France, the majority of working women performed jobs with low levels of skill and low productivity similar to those that had characterized women’s work for centuries. (p. 77)

The second major contribution of Women, Work, and Family consists of the model that the authors construct for analysing the changes that women’s work has gone through since the early 1700s. The basic idea is that to understand women’s work, one has to situate it in relation to the economic development, demographic change and the structure of the family. When this is done, Tilly and Scott suggest, women’s work during the 1700—1950 period can be divided into the following three periods: ‘the family economy’ (pre-industrial society), ‘the family wage economy’ (early industrialization), and ‘the family consumer economy’ (roughly in the twentieth century). In the family economy“, women basically worked at home, took care of the children and produced for the market as well as for the household. In the ‘family wage economy’ one of the tasks of women was to bring home as much cash as possible, and this created a difficult conflict between taking care of the home and earning money. In today’s economy, the ‘family consumer economy’, household management has become very specialized, something which has increased the division of labour in the family. During each of the three periods, Tilly and Scott stress, women’s work in towns has been different from that in the countryside. It has also varied considerably over the lifecycle; and it is crucial to distinguish between the work of female children, single women, married women, mothers, and widows.

Tilly and Scott’s work is meticulously researched and contains a host of interesting historical observations on the range of jobs that working class women have had since the 1700s (pp. 48-9, 139, 209). It also contains some sections on the role of dowries and marriage settlements (pp. 24-5, 94-5). From the viewpoint of the need to reconstitute economic sociology, one thesis in Women, Work, and Family should be highlighted, that is, that women’s behaviour in the marketplace cannot be adequately analysed without taking into account ‘the family and household setting in which women were embedded as daughters, wives and mothers’ (pp. 3-4). Tilly and Scott, like so many other scholars in the women’s studies tradition, thus give support for the idea that a sociological perspective is essential for understanding how the economy actually works.

Households, Employment, and Gender by Paula England and George Farkas (15) looks at the development of women’s situation at home and in the workplace between 1950 and 1980 in the US. According to the authors, this period has been one of profound change. Women’s participation in the labour force has increased, the sexual double standard has more or less disappeared, and the amount of housework has decreased. Some things, however, remain the same: the sex segregation of jobs, the amount of housework done by males, and female responsibility for the children. The changes, as well as the resistance to change, England and Farkas argue, can best be understood if one attempts an ‘integration’ on three levels (p. 4). First, one should try to see the links and interdependencies that exist between households and employment. Second, an attempt must be made to develop a perspective which emphasizes the choice of the individual as well as the importance of social structure. And third, one should try to unite the insights of economics, sociology and demography. The authors summarize their perspective like this: ‘Our framework aims to escape the characteristic failings of each of the two disciplines — sociologists’ lack of powerful and coherent theory and economists’ predilection for making questionable assumptions and ignoring empirical findings that do not fit comfortably within their paradigm. (15, p. 5)

Throughout Households, Employment, and Gender the authors oppose economic to sociological theories. When they discuss inequality in paid employment, for instance, they go through four theories in economics which try to explain discrimination in the hiring, placement and promotion of women: those of ‘taste’ (Becker), ‘statistical discrimination’ (Arrow), ‘error’, and ‘group monopoly’. Looking at the supply side, they stress that the length of work experience explains a huge part of the sex gap in pay according to recent sociological studies.

The key theoretical part of England and Farkas’ study and the one which shows how they envision the ‘integration’ between economics and sociology is centred on the notion of ‘implicit contract’. This concept, which they have borrowed from labour economics, can be applied to marriage as well as to employment according to their interpretation. They note that getting a job usually starts with a ‘search’ for information. The employment itself can best be understood as an implicit contract, in contrast to both a contingency- claim contract, where everything is spelled out, and a quick deal in the spot market. The reason for this is that a job is often long-term and governed more by implicit than by explicit rules. But marriage also has to start with a ‘search’ for a suitable partner. And just as training in a job can be seen as firm-specific investment, so can interaction in a marriage be viewed as ‘relationship-specific investment’. Even if interactions between the sexes are reminiscent of contingency-claim contracts or deals in the spot market, most marriages are similar to implicit contracts: the profit to be had in the long run outweighs the losses in the short run, and therefore the relationship lasts for some time.

Paula England and George Farkas’ book comes out of the women’s studies tradition and contains a forceful argument for equality between women and men. It is also a study which gives a hint of the new and interesting type of analysis which can come from juxtaposing sociology and economics when looking at women in the economy.