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Chapter 8 Toward Gender Equality: Progress and Bottlenecks Paula England I s the significance of gender declining in America? Are men’s and women’s lives and rewards becoming more similar? To answer this question, I examine trends in market work and unpaid household work, including child care. I consider whether men’s and women’s employment and hours in paid work are converging , and examine trends in occupational sex segregation and the sex gap in pay. I also consider trends in men’s and women’s hours of paid work and household work. The emergent picture is one of convergence within each of the two areas of paid and unpaid work. Yet progress is not continuous and has stalled recently . Sometimes it continues on one front and stops on another. Gender change is also asymmetric in two ways: things have changed in paid work more than in the household, and women have dramatically increased their participation in formerly “male” activities, but men’s inroads into traditionally female occupations or household tasks is very limited by comparison. I consider what these trends portend for the future of gender inequality. Robert Max Jackson argues (see chapter 7, this volume) that continued progress toward gender inequality is inevitable. I agree with him that many forces push in the direction of treating similarly situated men and women equally in bureaucratic organizations. Nonetheless, I conclude that the two related asymmetries in gender change—the sluggish change in the household and in men taking on traditionally female activities in any sphere—create bottlenecks that can dampen if not reverse egalitarian trends. TRENDS IN PAID WORK, OCCUPATIONAL SEGREGATION, AND THE PAY GAP The story of women’s increasing employment for pay is familiar, although the explanations are debated. Economists attribute rising women’s employment to ris- / 245 ing wages, which increased the opportunity cost of being a homemaker (Bergmann 2005). This was aided by disproportionate employment growth in the service occupations that had always hired mostly women (Oppenheimer 1970). Many believe that women’s increased employment was motivated by the increased need for two paychecks—in other words, by a decline in men’s real wages. It is true that, adjusted for inflation, men’s wages in the United States are lower today than they were in the early 1970s (Bernhardt et al. 2001), so this may have motivated the employment of some wives. However, during most of the century, women’s employment gains occurred while men’s wages were also rising. Moreover , today, employment levels are approximately the same for women with highearning as with low-earning husbands (Jackson 1998, 98), and highly educated women are more likely to be employed than women with less education (Juhn and Murphy 1997). Women’s employment is increasingly explained more by how much they can earn than by how much income husbands provide (Cohen and Bianchi 1999). Now that many wives are employed, the increased living standards their paychecks afford create social comparison processes that make other couples perceive a need for comparable income. Women’s labor-force participation has increased while men’s has gone down, but men’s decline is much smaller than women’s increase. The decrease in men’s labor-force participation results from staying in school longer, retiring earlier, availability of state payments for those who are disabled, and a growing phenomenon of discouraged workers giving up and dropping out of the labor force. Figure 8.1 maps women’s and men’s labor-force participation together for the prime employment ages of twenty-five to fifty-four, showing movement toward convergence . However, after decades of increase, women’s labor-force participation rates did not change between 1990 and 2000. Table 8.1 shows more detail on women’s employment increases. A snapshot in one week of 1978 showed 56 percent of women employed for pay, and by 1998 this figure was up to 71 percent. The proportion of women working full-time (at least thirty-five hours per week) was 38 percent in 1978, moving to 51 percent in 1998. In both years, wives with children under six were less likely to be employed and, if employed, were less likely to be employed full-time. Yet in percentage terms, wives with young children showed larger increases, moving from 38 percent to 58 percent employed, and from 21 percent to 35 percent employed full-time. If we look at annual hours of paid employment, which reflects both weeks per year...

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