There are good reasons for optimism. History looks quite different when viewed from women’s perspective. World War Two may have been traumatic, but it was nonetheless beneficial for women, breaking down job barriers and creating new openings. The 1960s brought the contraceptive revolution, giving women independent control over their fertility and opening up the option of voluntary childlessness. The 1970s and 1980s brought equal opportunities legislation that produced a 10% increase in women’s earnings as compared with men’s in Britain and the USA. The 1980s also brought the impact of European Union (EU) policies and European Court of Justice (ECJ) decisions insisting that the principle of nondiscrimination between men and women, in particular in all aspects of pay, had to be fully implemented throughout Europe. With the decline of the manufacturing industry in Europe after World War Two, modern economies shifted towards greater emphasis on service sector industries, all offering more congenial work environments to women. Recent developments have created a new and beneficial social and economic situation for women.

On the other hand, the potential for change does not seem to have borne fruit. Men and women are still segregated in different occupations, with women concentrated in what is often described as a ‘job ghetto’ of low-grade, low-paid work. Sex differentials in earnings of 10%–20% in Europe and Australia, 20%–30% in the USA, and 40% in Japan still remain, even if these are smaller than before (OECD, 2001: 139; Padavic and Reskin, 2002: 123). Men seem always to have the upper hand, so that it is more of a struggle for women to get what they want. In practice, it is argued, women remain disadvantaged and dissatisfied with their lot.

This book offers a more empirically grounded review of developments in recent decades than is offered by most current texts on women’s employment, and thus a more informed assessment of the main theories accounting for women’s social and economic position today. It presents a new analysis of women’s position in the labour market and of the social changes currently under way in all modern societies. The focus is on women’s choice between paid employment and full-time homemaking, and on women’s position within the workforce. The choices women make seem to be changing, prompting vigorous debate over the nature of the changes, and whether sex differences in lifestyles are finally disappearing

The focus is paid employment in the market economy and the terms ‘work’ and ‘employment’ are used interchangeably throughout the book for stylistic variation and simplicity. As the next chapter demonstrates, strictly speaking, work covers a broader range of activities than employment. Similarly, the terms sex and gender are used interchangeably, for stylistic variation, and because there is a perfect 2overlap for the vast majority of people. Strictly speaking, gender refers to the meanings that societies and individuals ascribe to female and male categories defined by sex.

The alternative view is that women have been gaining economic equality with men as levels of female employment rose steadily from the 1950s onwards. Women’s gains have been men’s losses, as women steal men’s jobs and feminise them. Men are displaced, socially as well as economically. Chapter 3 examines the feminisation of the workforce and finds that jobs have been defeminised as well as being demasculinised. Apart from the creation of a segregated part-time workforce, there have been no substantial changes in the level of female employment for over 150 years.

Do women really want paid employment? It has become received wisdom in recent years that they do, that any differences that might have existed in men’s and women’s work orientations, work commitment and ambitions have now faded away. Women want interesting jobs and well-paid work just as much as men, but are prevented from getting them by discrimination, overt and covert. Chapter 4 reviews the evidence on attitudes to work and how they are changing. Attitudes to the sexual division of labour in the home are examined in a cross-national perspective to show how differential sex-roles are being remodelled rather than abandoned. One sex-role stereotype that seems most resistant to change is the idea that power and authority are in some way a male prerogative. Women are surprisingly unwilling to co-operate with women managers.

If women’s labour force attachment has really been increasing in recent years, as is so often stated, we would expect to see increasing employment stability and continuity of employment among women. A review of the evidence in Chapter 5 shows on the contrary that the sex differential in labour turnover rates has not changed in 20 years and that women’s employment histories display rising discontinuity.

The key explanation offered by patriarchy theory for women’s disadvantaged position within the workforce is that occupational segregation is used to restrict women to a female job ghetto of low-paid work, so that women invariably earn less than men. Chapter 6 reviews the evidence to find that in this area there has been far more change, all of it to women’s advantage, than feminist theory admits. More important, recent comparative studies show that occupational segregation is not the 3main cause of the pay gap between men and women, as was long believed. A review of the impact of legislation in Chapter 7 confirms the importance of equal opportunities policies, but shows the law to be a two-edged weapon. Overall, women made real gains in the 1980s and 1990s which cannot be explained solely by equal pay and opportunities legislation. We must thus reconsider the competing theories explaining women’s social and economic position and assess how effective they are now in accounting for current developments.

There is no shortage of theories claiming to explain women’s subordinate position in the labour market and in the family. All of them are plausible; have some element of truth in them. Very few of them have been subjected to rigorous testing in a wide range of cultures. In Theorising Patriarchy, Sylvia Walby reviews the enormous number of theories that have been offered in the last 20 years to explain women’s relatively subordinate position in society and the workforce or, as she puts it, women’s exploitation and oppression. However, her review, like so many others, discusses theories in terms of their intellectual merits and explanatory adequacy. At the end of the day the crucial test of theory is against reality. Theory that rests on inadequate or selective evidence is weak, no matter how coherent a world view it offers.

Following Einstein, theory is not right or wrong. Theory is either useful, or not useful, in making sense of the world, helping one to understand change processes and formulate further questions to address. On this basis, there are four main theories that are currently useful for understanding women’s social and economic position. The most important competing theories today are Steven Goldberg’s theory of the inevitability of male dominance and patriarchy based on psychophysiological processes; Heidi Hartmann’s theory of men’s collective organisation to further their own interests against those of women through trade unions, the legal system and political organisations, as illustrated by a pattern of occupational segregation that is to men’s advantage; Gary Becker’s rational choice theory of the allocation of time and labour to domestic work and employment based on the role specialisation of husband and wife; and Catherine Hakim’s preference theory showing that women (and men) choose between home-centred, work-centred and adaptive lifestyles after women gain genuine choices in modern liberal societies. 4Between them these theories cover the full range of explanations so far offered: physiological, psychological, sociological and economic.

The standard sociological explanation for women’s position in society, and in the workforce, is that social structural and institutional factors explain everything; women’s lives are wholly determined by forces outside them: the particular country they live in, its social policies, and employers’ policies. For example, Crompton (1997) and Padavic and Reskin (2002) discuss women’s position in the workforce within a ‘victim feminism’ framework that allows women no room for active responsibility or decision – no ‘agency’ as social scientists put it. They are unable to explain why women have co-operated and colluded with social systems (and men) that exploit and oppress them, and why women rarely rebelled against sex discrimination. The four theories discussed here all provide, for different time periods, answers to these ultimate questions of why particular social structures and institutions have been created and maintained, by women as well as men, even though they appear to disadvantage women. The theories also identify what needs to change in order for women’s position to improve.

The pattern of women’s employment, and non-work, remains central to any theory. Women’s position in society as a whole is jointly determined by their access to, and role and status in paid employment and the status accorded to their reproductive and domestic activities. In industrial societies women’s economic position in the workforce is gaining importance relative to non-market domestic and childcare functions. Various theories link the segregation of men and women in paid employment to the domestic division of labour between husband and wife. An adequate theory must be able to explain patterns of sex-based occupational segregation, in particular the vertical job segregation that finds men concentrated in the higher status and higher-paid positions. It must also be able to account for the domestic division of labour, and women’s choice between the full-time domestic role and some combination of paid employment and non-market work.

5A second element of his theory points to the effect of hormonal and other physiological differences in shaping the character of private heterosexual relationships, and the mutually reinforcing congruence between personal styles in public and private spheres. Sex differences have their roots in physiology, and are developed further by the socialisation process, to create an emotional expectation or preference for male dominance in personal and sexual relationships. Private heterosexual relationships set a pattern for relationships between men and women in the workplace. At the minimum, this creates an invisible barrier to establishing egalitarian and relaxed work roles and relationships that are not ‘coloured’ by patterns in the sexual arena. At worst, sex-roles and styles of behaviour established in heterosexual relationships carry over into role expectations and behaviour patterns in the workplace, consciously or subconsciously.

Goldberg is sometimes wrongly classified as an evolutionist sociobiologist, castigated for evolutionary theories he does not address and for exaggerations of his own theory that he does not offer. His approach is similar to that of Rossi (1977), who sought to incorporate the influence of physiological factors in interaction with social and cultural factors to explain why women actively seek greater involvement in childcare than do men, especially in the first six years of a child’s life, although she refers to evolutionary theory, which Goldberg eschews completely. Goldberg set out to explain why men invariably get almost all the top jobs and top positions in all societies, past and present. In his first book, the emphasis was on anthropological research evidence showing that no society had ever existed in which women ruled. In his more recent book the emphasis shifts to contemporary societies and the evidence that within the workforce vertical job segregation is pronounced. All other hierarchies are also dominated by men. Goldberg points out that exceptional women sometimes reach the top, Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher being two examples. However, the exceptions will remain exceptions unless social and cultural factors start to overcome the influence of hormonal differences in the development of children and adolescents. He accepts that determined social engineering might achieve this, but it remains to be seen. The Israeli kibbutzim failed in their efforts to alter sex-role differentiation; socialist Russia and China failed to eliminate vertical job segregation; egalitarian and family-friendly policies in Sweden reduced sex differences in earnings, but again failed to reduce vertical job segregation. Physiological differences between males and females do not fully determine behaviour: they only create dispositions which may be valued or belittled, encouraged or discouraged by a society. Similarly, Goldberg is not saying that men are necessarily more able, competent or effective in using positions of power and authority, only that they are motivated to seek such positions with greater determination and persistence than women, and are more prepared to make sacrifices to get there; in terms of effort and foregoing other activities or benefits.

As a result, patriarchy is universal in that authority and leadership are, and always have been, associated with the male in every society. He defines patriarchy as any system of organisation (political, economic, industrial, financial, religious or social) in which the overwhelming number of upper positions in hierarchies are occupied by males. Patriarchy refers only to suprafamilial levels of organisation. Authority in familial and dyadic relationships is a manifestation of the psychophysiological reality he labels male dominance.

6The attraction of Goldberg’s theory is that it is simple, specific and provides a sufficient explanation of vertical job segregation in the workforce and of male domination in politics and other public hierarchies. It is the only theory that can explain some of the more inconvenient facts about women as well as men, such as the apparently universal preference for a male leader or boss, as noted in Chapter 4. His theory is also consistent with Chodorow’s (1978) and Gilligan’s (1982, 1993) theories of qualitative personality differences between men and women. Gilligan describes men as being more individualistic, achievement-oriented, detached from others, and oriented more towards power, distinctive activity and success. She argues that women define themselves in terms of personal relationships, are unselfish, concerned about fulfilling the needs of others and feel powerless. Along with Miller (1976) she describes women as accepting subordinate relationships with men (1993: 168). Gilligan insists that women’s greater interest in social relationships is invariably benign, consisting of a concern to care for others rather than a detached curiosity or a desire to manipulate and control others emotionally. The empirical validity of her work has been questioned (Treadwell, 1987: 280–81; Beutel and Marini, 1995: 438). Despite this, Gilligan’s thesis has been accepted with positive acclaim, rather than rejected as ‘sexist’ in the same way as Goldberg’s thesis and other theories that acknowledge important gender differences in personality and behaviour have been.

Goldberg also offers a novel explanation for the fact that the most highly-paid occupations tend to be male-dominated. The explanation usually offered is that male-dominated occupations are rewarded disproportionately well and female occupations are undervalued and less well-paid. This theory led to demands for equal pay for work of equal value policies (Treiman and Hartmann, 1981) as noted in Chapter 7. Another explanation is that workers queue for jobs and, as (male) employers invariably prefer men over women if men are available, men get the cream of the jobs and women end up in the worst paid jobs (Reskin and Roos, 1990). Goldberg points out that if these theories were true, there would be no male-dominated occupations that paid substantially less than women’s occupations. In fact, there are many male jobs that are low status and low-paid. Male roles are not high status because they are male, Goldberg argues. It is simply that any role that acquires high status (as indicated by high earnings) will attract more men than women, so will become male-dominated as a result of its position in the hierarchy (Goldberg, 1993: 108). Men never need to be encouraged to apply for promotion, whereas women do. The example is often quoted of the job advertisement that failed to attract any women applicants at all until the salary was reduced by half in a re-advertisement (Hakim, 1979: 50).

Goldberg points out (1993: 106) that sexual differentiation in motivation to attain high status positions is statistical and probabilistic, like other attitudes and behaviour differences, rather than an absolute difference. Socialisation in childhood and adolescence magnifies and enhances psychological and personality differences to create the discrete qualitative differences observed between adult men and women. Physiology does not determine, but predisposes, towards ambitious competitiveness in males far more than in females, but there is variation around the two averages. Other writers have also criticised the misleading use of averages to describe and differentiate male and female behaviour and attitudes, as averages 7hide the large overlap between the two groups in terms of behavioral styles; however, they have also emphasised the striking differences between men’s and women’s testosterone levels and the much larger variation in male levels (Treadwell, 1987: 269, 278; see also Hakim, 2000: 259). Within-group variation for men is almost as large as the sex differential. More important, the sex differential in testosterone levels is substantial enough to contribute some part of the explanation for sex differences in everyday behaviour.

Goldberg’s thesis is supported by more recent research on the effects of testosterone, and on mate selection. Dabbs (2000) had the clever idea of testing testosterone levels using samples of saliva instead of blood, because people are more disposed to spit...