You Can Go Your Own Way? Job Flexibility, Skills, and Occupational Gender Segregation in Advanced Democracies

Despite the shift from the Fordist economies of the post-war decades to the “knowledge economies” of today and the accompanying surge in levels of education and labor force participation among women, why do women and men still choose markedly different careers? The paper presents a theoretical framework in which the distribution of workplace flexibility across jobs affects the level of gender segregation in the labor market. Compared to men, women do a larger share of the household and childrearing work and prefer more workplace flexibility, such as shorter working days and part-time work. When some employers supply jobs that are highly flexible whereas others supply jobs that are highly inflexible, segregation is predicted to arise. Combined with the Varieties of Capitalism's emphasis on specific skills as a source of occupational segregation, the job flexibility perspective can explain both between- and within-country variation in occupational segregation. Across countries, Liberal Market Economies are hypothesized to have lower levels of segregation due to (i) a higher incidence of general as opposed to specific skills and (ii) a more equal distribution of flexibility across jobs than particularly the Nordic Coordinated Market Economies, where the public sector is significantly more flexible than the private sector. Within countries, segregation should be highest in sectors with the largest differences in flexibility between jobs. I find empirical support for these hypotheses using both cross-national data for 20 OECD countries and within-country evidence from the United States and Sweden.