Development, Globalization and The Gendered Division Of The Work World: How The Logic Of Employers Shaped The Demand For Female Labor From Victorian Britain To The Contemporary Global South

A persistent weakness in the Sociology of Development has been its under-attention to gender dynamics. However, there is a parallel weakness in the Sociology of Gender and Development of under-attention to the capitalist logic that motivates the decision to employ either men or women for particular jobs. The much-needed drive to restore women’s agency to narratives of development has had the ironic effect of producing insufficient attention to capitalist agency and the discretionary choices involved in opening up economic opportunities to women.

     This paper presents a demand side theory of occupational sex-typing. Male employers are conflicted between the dual imperatives of seeking the cheapest possible labor, which generally implies hiring women, and maintaining patriarchical preserves of male privilege, which implies reserving jobs for men. The structural forces which shape this decision have changed profoundly over time due to the dual (and conflicting) dynamics of development and globalization.

     The author begins with a case study of two large Victorian British white collar employers to lay out a theoretical model of how cost structure and buffering from labor competition economically facilitates or hinders the introduction of women to traditionally male occupations. The findings from Victorian Britain are then contrasted with those from the twentieth century United States, and from the empirical literature on female employment in the Global South. The differential distribution of global wage competition and protection from such competition, the rise of commodity chains, the rise of education and its complex effects on the availability of adolescent labor, differential pressures to conform with either traditional gender systems or Western gender systems, and the increased importance of both proletarianized female self-employment and, male-run family enterprises that combine economic and patriarchical utilities – have led to a profound transformation of the occupational sex-typing process beyond what was observable in nineteenth century Britain.