The Costs of Exclusion: Gender Job Segregation, Structural Change and the Labour Share of Income

Abstract

While women's share of employment has risen in many countries over the last two decades, gender job segregation has worsened, with women increasingly excluded from 'good' jobs in the industrial sector. In this article, the determinants of gender job segregation are assessed using panel data for a broad set of developing countries covering the period 1991-2015. The effect of gender job segregation on all workers, via the labour share of income, is also analysed. The results identify two major contributors to gender job segregation -the rising capital/labour ratio and the ratio of female/male labour force participation rates -indicative of 'crowding' and exclusion as economies move up the industrial ladder. The analysis further indicates that the crowding of women into lower quality jobs has a negative effect on workers as a whole by dampening the labour share of income. Those processes are influenced by global and macroeconomic conditions and policies that have circumscribed the expansion of high-quality jobs relative to labour supply, intensifying competition for 'good' jobs and weakening labour's bargaining power.The authors thank Jayati Ghosh, Alex Izurieta, Richard Kozul-Wright, and participants at the Expert Group Meeting on Macroeconomic Policies and Women's Empowerment for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We are also grateful to the editors and three anonymous referees for their helpful feedback.Development and Change 50(4): 976-1008.

The Early Impact of Covid-19 on Job Losses among Black Women in the United States

“…Feminist economic theory has examined the role discrimination plays in occupational crowding by gender (Beller 1982), notably the historical exclusion of women from jobs that are deemed more appropriate for men, such as in the "goods-producing" sector of the economy, which has a long history of union activism to secure adequate pay, benefits, and worker protections, as well as exclusionary hiring practices. Stephanie Seguino and Elissa Braunstein (2019) also note the role of opportunity hoarding by men for "good jobs" as well as employer motives in maintaining occupational segregation by gender in labor markets across the world. In addition, feminist economist Heidi Hartmann (1976) wrote about the role of patriarchy in the origins of gender segregation in the US workforce, and, in recent research she conducted with Ariane Hegewisch (Hartmann and Hegewisch 2014), shows that occupational crowding by gender is still quite prevalent in the US.…”

Defeminization, Structural Transformation and Technological Upgrading in Manufacturing

“…Note that these are distinct from the four hypotheses put forth by Seguino and Braunstein (2018). That is, these three hypotheses endeavour to explain why, in the context of defeminization driven by technological upgrading, firms either do not retain women workers they previously hired or maintain the same proportions of men and women workers, rather than why firms in male-intensive industries tend not to hire women workers in the first place.…”

“…1 This holds all the more strongly in the face of technological upgrading in manufacturing, so that women can benefit from the better jobs created through employment reallocation as well as within industries. Following the same line of argument in their study on gender segregation and structural transformation in developing countries, Seguino and Braunstein (2018) use industrial jobs as a proxy for good jobs, based on the authors' assessment of industry's relatively high labour productivity and relatively low share of 'vulnerable' employment, defined as contributing family workers and own-account workers.…”

“…Barrientos et al., 2004; Joekes, 1999); econometric studies (e.g. Greenstein and Anderson, 2017; Seguino and Braunstein, 2018; Tejani and Milberg, 2016); and studies using accounting decomposition methods to identify the drivers of changing female shares of manufacturing employment (e.g. Kucera and Tejani, 2014; Saraçoğlu et al., 2018).…”

Distribution and Gender Effects on the Path of Economic Growth: Comparative Evidence for Developed, Semi-Industrialized, and Low-Income Agricultural Economies

“…While these long-run effects are not unexpected for the low-income countries as they advance toward higher development, we are unsure as to the reasoning behind the potential contractionary pressures on growth due to sustained increases in female wages in high-income countries. However, Seguino and Braunstein (2019) highlight the concurrent decline in male labor force participation as women's increases and the impact of the quality of new jobs generated from growth on women's (and men's) position in the labor market. To some extent, this may be useful in explaining this short-run contractionary pressure on growth for LIAEs if improvements in female wages are combined with an overall fall in the wage share due to the impact on male workers or access to better jobs.…”