Gender, Class, and Varieties of Capitalism

Abstract

The “Varieties of Capitalism” (VoC) perspective is innovative and challenging for the comparative study of gender stratification. However, the project of “gendering the VoC” has some serious shortcomings. While the economic functionalism of VoC theory is in principle gender-neutral, it is in fact implicitly predicated on a man's world. A key proposition of the model, that social protection contributes to the functioning of labor markets is not applicable to women. Moreover, the model's blindness to political forces that are critical to women's employment limits its ability to explain cross-country variations in a major dimension of gender stratification. The VoC perspective is more valuable in explaining differences in women's insertion into the job structure. However, its insights into the effects of skills regimes on women's employment opportunities can be enhanced by attending to the intersection between class and gender. Skill specificity, the critical causal mechanism identified by VoC theorists, has different implications for women in different class positions.