Growth in Service Sector Employment and MSA Gender Earnings Inequality: 1970-1980

Wage Variations in Advanced Producer Service Work in New York

“…Another categorisation focuses upon a core and a periphery within the service sector based on product market characteristics, profitability, capital intensity, and work condition (internal labour market) [Lang and Dickens, 1988]. Labour market segmentation theory suggests that within each service sector, occupational segmentation between high-wage non-routine whitecollar work and low-wage routine white-collar work, service, or blue-collar work further accentuates the differentiation among workers especially among socio-demographic groups because women and minorities constitute a large portion of the routine low-wage workers [Lorence, 1991;Wolch and Law, 1993]. Furthermore, a very small percentage of work in the service sector is the manufacturing equivalent of precision blue-collar work, a large portion of the workers are flexible workers (that is, they are not full-time full-year employees receiving specific employment benefits) and collective bargaining is not the norm [Abraham and McKersie, 1990;Noyelle, 1983;Osterman, 1988].…”

“…Researchers on labour markets [Coverman, 1988;Doeringer and Piore, 1971;Glass et al, 1988;Granovetter, 1985;Hanson and Pratt, 1995;Levy and Murnane, 1992;McLafferty and Preston, 1991] have more or less accepted the following factors to play a major role in labour market outcomes: (i) industrial or sectoral affiliation; (ii) occupational characteristics; (iii) job characteristics (e.g. full-time full year versus flexible work, the structure of the internal labour market, protection/sheltering, and bargaining power); (iv) demographic characteristics (not only gender, race, age, marital status, fertility but the issue of social reproduction, education, and skill formation); and (v) social and professional networks [Hanson and Pratt, 1988;1991;. Researchers recognise that causal processes in labour markets vary based on the economic, political, social and spatial contexts.…”

Women's Prospects for Leadership in Social Welfare

“…Job seekers do not have equal opportunity when they seek paid work and, pertinent to our task, women are usually constrained to peripheral jobs in core market sectors or to peripheral sector jobs altogether. There is evidence that service work, particularly social service work, is particularly disadvantageous for women (Smith, 1984;Lorence, 1988;Tienda, Smith & Ortiz, 1987). Vertical segregation of authority in work organizations reserves the positions with greatest control over resources and persons to majority (white) men (Acker, 1988;Reskin, 1988).…”

“…(Comparable percentages for men in 1980 were 56.4 and 16.1.) Many new jobs were created between 1970 and 1980 in the social and personal service sectors but they paid poorly for both women and men (Lorence, 1988). Women social service workers have earnings that are not too much lower than men's because men earn less in social service jobs (compared to blue collar work), not because women earn more.…”

Period effects, cohort effects, and the narrowing gender wage gap

“…Most notably, between 1970 and 1995, the manufacturing industry, home to high wages for low-skill men, declined from 25 percent of total employment to 15 percent (Wright & Dwyer 2003). As a result, men at the bottom of wage distribution lost ground, which helped narrow the gender wage gap without an increase in women’s wages (Bernhardt, Morris, & Hancock 1995), and while a shift away from manufacturing industries to service industries in the 1970s resulted in lower wages for both sexes, male wages saw a greater decline (Lorence 1991). …”