Male flight from computer work: A new look at occupational resegregation and ghettoization

Does the sustained entry of significant numbers of women into an occupation precipitate a decline in status of that occupation? Does feminization inevitably result in occupational resegregation? Once the process of feminization has commenced, is ghettoization--the emergence of a highly internally stratified occupation--the only alternative to resegregation? We address these questions by examining one feminizing occupation-computer work.

Social scientists have vigorously debated the significance of recent changes in the economic status of women, and their observations point to both continuity and change. For example, although the sex gap in earnings has narrowed in the last decade, women working in full-time, full-year jobs still earn, on average, only 75 percent as much as their male counterparts. Moreover, about half of the narrowing of the gap has resulted from a decline in men's real earnings rather than from an increase in women's real earnings (Institute for Women's Policy Research 1993).

Analysts have also drawn differing conclusions from the decline in the sex segregation of occupations in the last two decades: After remaining steady for most of the century, the proportion of employed women who would have had to change their occupations in order to be distributed in the same manner as men declined by roughly 18 percent during the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, the index of dissimilarity by sex across detailed census occupational categories declined from 67 in 1970 to 55 in 1990.(1) Women's entry into prominent male-dominated fields such as law and medicine has en especially widely heralded. Yet, for every woman who works as a lawyer there are 170 women clerical workers, 50 women sales clerks, 20 waitresses, and 15 female nurse's aides (Jacobs 1989a; Jacobsen 1994; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics 1989). Women are still a long way from achieving integration with men at the workplace.

The resegregation thesis is one of the most intriguing interpretations of recent changes in women's occupational standing. It holds that women's entry into previously male-dominated occupations is not a stable outcome, but rather represents one phase in a process that generally ends in the re-establishment of sex-segregated work roles. Reskin and Roos (1990; hereafter Reskin and Roos) present the most developed analysis of the resegregation process. They examine 14 cases in which, in the 1970s, women made significant...