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THE THEORY OF TRANSLATION

CODE-SEQUENCING GENERAL AND SPECIFIC EXPLANATIONS OF SEXUAL SEGREGATION AT WORK
HIGH-GROUND FORMATS Since the 1970s, theoretical and conceptual battles on the sexual division of work among feminist scholars have been waged on both high (totalistic) and middle (more limited explanations) grounds. On the high-ground, the early disputes have been fought from two major trenches, each attributing the root causes of gender divisions at work in toto to either one of two systems: capitalism or patriarchy. The former position draws on Marxist theory and subsequent efforts to rectify its reputed sex-blindness. However, much of these efforts culminating in the s-c domestic labor debate of the mid-1970s, added up to nothing more than articially inseminating as it were gender into the basic framework and concepts of class and value theory. Thus, the core argument here was that womens unpaid domestic work at home and their marginal position in paid work ensure the needs of capitalism for cheap labor and a readily exploitable reserve army. According to critics, subsuming gender to the categories of capitalism and class in this manner smokescreens the possibility that men as a distinct social group might also have a stake in their marginal position at work or domestic connement. It also camouages the role that organized male workers might have played in bringing this about. Nor does it recognize that women irrespective of class determination might have a common position of disadvantage vis--vis men. In the opposite trench were radical feminists who sought the causes of sexual inequalities in patriarchy alone. This other extreme argues that over time male dominance has in virtually all societies and productive systems been rooted in the family and womens reproductive role. The perpetuation of male power over women is linked here to a whole range of factors, from the institutions of marriage and heterosexuality, to ideologies of sexual differences and male superiority, to psychological distinctions sponsored by childrearing practices, etc. Grounding gender analysis in this type of universalistic and ahistorical account of patriarchy glosses over, as critics suggest, signicant variations in gender relations as a result of other intervening divisions like class, age, and race. It doesnt take you far in explaining substantial differentials in family and work experiences among women from diverse classes and ethnic groups. Nor can it adequately account for the ways in which gender divisions are actually created in the economic sphere. Feminist theorizing today had abandoned these extremes in favor of more synthetic and dual-systems approaches, which give equal

premium to both capitalism and patriarchy, class and gender, and the way they intersect to shape varied and shifting patterns of sexual inequalities over time.1 MIDDLE-GROUND FORMATS2 Middle-ground formats concern more limited attempts which marshal existing concepts to explain why women usually end up at the margins of the waged labor market, without explicitly using them in the context of any totalizing theory. Three standard accounts of job segregation by sex invite attention here. A) Human capital theory: Drawing from classic mainstream economists supply/demand and consumer theories, this account explains gender inequality as a function of womens commitment to the domestic sphere (Mincer 1962). The exibility of the female workforce stems from alternative forms of work open to them in the household. It is assumed that differentials in wages and participation rates in the job-market merely manifest disparities (understood here as differences in levels of education, skills, etc on the basis of which employers make their choices) which human capital actors transport with them in the market, and that the household rationally decides on its labor market activities to maximize income and leisure as a unit.3 Women are typically seen to command less human capital and thus also less wages, not least due to career interruptions associated with childrearing. This micro-approach has been indicted for not only failing to explain why certain occupations as a whole are staffed by women and not men, but also for neglecting the role of collective struggles in occupational sex-typing. B) Segmented labor market theories: A red thread here is the view that there is a certain correspondence between the sexual division of labor and divisions in labor market structures, marked by high-paying primary jobs in oligopolistic rms at one end, and secondary jobs with high turnover and low wages in competitive industries, at the other (Edwards 1979; Edwards & Reich 1982). However there is pandemonium in explaining exactly what made for labor market dualism or segmentation in the rst place, and why women tend to ll the lower grade slots.4
1This

new wave splits however into two ranks. On one side, there are those who rally to the call for a unied theoretical project, integrating class and gender analysis (Eisenstein 1979) into a totalistic theory of capitalist patriarchy or patriarchal capitalism. This group however has lent itself easily according to critics to slippages back to either Marxism or radical feminism, where gender is reduced to class or vice versa.. On the other side, are those who conceive capitalism and patriarchy as two separate but interactive systems. This dual systems approach holds that each system must be theorized independently, although they may be found interacting and often in combination with other dynamics (e.g., race) at any given historical moment. Methodologically, (cf 1.1.) The dualist position further breaks down into two factions: one which relegates class and gender relations to different spheres (class/economy and gender, patriarchy/domestic sphere, the hazards of which have already been discussed in 1.1): another which sees these relations overlap between work and family spheres, or they may even be embedded and developed in both. In this sense, class and gender systems should be seen as operating on all levels of society (we reserve critical comment here to the latter discussions of Walbys work, which typies this view).
2Apart 3An

from Bradley, Walby (1986) and Milkman (1987) are our vital way-nders into these formats.

alternative approach deriving particularly from neoclassical theory of individual preference acknowledges in contrast that men and women are not equal starters in job-seeking. It argues that employers may exercise a taste for discrimination against hiring certain groups, like blacks and women. As such, women crowd into sectors which men shun or where employers are not discriminative. Womens low wages here result from the propensity to overstocking.
4There

is conict on whether labor market divisions accrue to differences in skills, such as employers tendency to hold unto workers with accumulated rm-specic skills; or whether segmentation derives from power struggles between groups. Accordingly, workforce division into permanent and casual workers serves management needs for exible response to market changes and as hedge against potential concerted industrial action (Edwards 1979). Others emphasize the role of male workers and trade unions in the seizure and protection of primary jobs for themselves (Rubery 1980). The latter group of radical economists can in turn be differentiated according to whether gender divisions are seen as by-products of capitallabor struggles (Humphries 1978, 1981), or whether they are seen as a central feature of analysis (Hartmann 1979), or whether they are ignored altogether (Kreckel 1979).

All in all, save for some exceptions (e.g., Hartmann), critics argue that while segmentation theories may illuminate some aspects of womens work, they dont go very far in explaining segregation of the horizontal type, where whole occupations end up being largely womens work (and which in several cases may as technically dened be considered as primary rather than secondary). Moreover, explanations in terms of employers motivations and union response skirts the fact that segregation predates capitalist industry and cannot tell us why it was socially acceptable to allocate women to secondary jobs in the rst place. Except for Heidi Hartmann,5 radical theorists who look at sexual segregation in terms of capital-labor struggles also tend to presume that workers as a class automatically have a stake in opposing segregation. C) Industrial reserve and labor process theories: As earlier noted, writers in the former stream invoking Marxist theory of reserve army of labor to explain segregation assume that sexual divisions of labor in the family constitute women as cheap, expendable labor and thus preferred sources of the industrial reserve army for capital. Married womens traditional family responsibilities and partial dependence on the s-c family-wage earned by their husbands ensure their status as secondary workers and contingent workforce. Empirically however, this assumption tallies ill with the postwar trend of women workers increasing status of permanency in the labor force. Further, this stream has also been severely scolded for failure to account for why capitalists, if women are indeed cheap labor, do not constantly employ them in preference to men? It may very well be as one critic argued (Walby 1986) that womens position in the family on which they allegedly easily fall back in times of demand depression, far from being a matter of free choice, is determined rst and foremost by their position in the workplace and the constraints they face there. And that their removal from the workforce arises under given conditions less from management than from the exclusionary policies of male-dominated trade unions. A far more sophisticated, though incomplete, account of job segregation in capitalist economies can be found in the original reformulation of Marxist views on the labor process by Harry Braverman (1974). Unlike common wisdom in the genre, his version connects segregation not to the prot motives of capital, nor to its relationship with domestic labor, but to the historical development of the capitalist work-process itself. Here, the struggle for control between capital and labor over the work-process has led to the rising degradation of work tasks, or de-skilling as he called it, as new technology and work organization are introduced. Succeeding attempts (Matthei 1982) to genderize Bravermans account argued that as capitalists introduced new technology and work organizations they in fact created mens and womens work, utilizing characteristics that were socially ascribed to men (e.g., skill, technological know-how) and women (e.g., cheapness, adaptability). Male attempts to retain traditional forms of skill and work tended to entrench this type of sexual division. Thus, dualization rst occurred in the labor process itself, then to be mirrored in the dualistic or segmented nature of labor markets.6

5Hartmann

argues that under given conditions male workers and capitalists interests in sexual segregation may coincide (as seen in the practice of exclusionary trade unionism) rather than conict.
6 Or

as another writer (Cockburn 1986) puts it, notions of technology and skill are themselves founded on gender distinctions. Reworked de-skilling approaches while being q quite potent tool in analyzing the way(s) in which gender and class relations interact and evolve together within a particular historical context, are still narrowly focused on work and market issues. As such, they tend to leave unexplored the way these relations operate outside the workplace (Bradley 1989), in the family.