Women and Men as Class and Race Actors

Abstract

Paula England's ambition in Gender Revolution: Uneven and Stalled (2010) is to explain why occupational sex segr gation and the gender division of familial labor are still robust despite decades of egalitarian values and policies. But because the explanations she offers the status of hypotheses rather than well-documented conclusions (England 2010, p. 150), her article raises many questions for which we have few answers. Still, there is perhaps more evidence about some of these questions than England considers. In particular, England incorporates notions of class and social mobility into her explanations, grappling with how these intersect with gender identi ties and gendered jobs. The main argument to which I will respond is the one that treats men and women as gendered economic actors in pursuit of gender-typical jobs and family responsibilities. She proposes that occupa tion integration occurred primarily because a typically gendered path was unavailable to women from a middle-class background. The class positions of all other men and women were compatible with pursuing gendered occu pations, thus maintaining much of the gender order. Although England does not discuss counterfactuals, we must assume that if a typically female set of occupations sat atop the hierarchy alongside elite male occupations, no change whatsoever would have occurred since women would have entered those jobs. Similarly, had there been greater demand in men's blue-collar jobs, commensurate with the demand in upper white-collar jobs that pulled in women (an important factor England does not mention), women still would not have entered them because of their preference for female-dominated pinkand lower white-collar jobs. Without evidence to support these counterfactuals, England's framework rests on shaky ground, and other interpretations of the trajectory of occu pational segregation and gender inequality seem at least as plausible. Those