Reskin – Labor Markets as Queues
Introduction to Sex Segregation
Historical Context of Labor Markets
Persistent and pervasive sex segregation has been a defining feature of labor markets throughout history, with certain occupations consistently dominated by one gender (Gross 1968; Beller 1984). This segregation is not merely a reflection of individual choices but signifies deeper structural issues within the economy.
Notable gains for women in male-dominated occupations during the 1970s: This period marked a significant shift, challenging established norms as women began to enter fields traditionally reserved for men. These occupations included:
Pharmacy: Once a predominantly male profession, women started making substantial inroads.
Bank management: Women began to break into managerial roles within the financial sector.
Bartending: A service industry role that saw a crucial increase in female participation.
Typesetting: An industrial trade that diversified its workforce.
These specific gains raised important questions regarding why women made significant inroads in these fields yet experienced stagnation or even regression in many other domains. This observation suggests that the integration of women into specific occupations is not uniform and is influenced by various underlying factors, rather than a universal trend across all male-dominated sectors.
Research Study Overview
Patricia Roos and Barbara F. Reskin conducted a comprehensive two-part study to understand the dynamics of occupational sex segregation:
Multivariate analyses on census data: This quantitative approach examined changing sex compositions across a wide range of detailed occupations, identifying broad patterns and statistical relationships between various factors and the feminization of jobs.
In-depth case studies of 14 occupations: This qualitative component focused on specific occupations where women’s representation significantly increased. The criterion for selection was a minimum doubling of women's representation beyond the overall labor force increase during a specified period, allowing for a detailed exploration of the social and economic mechanisms at play.
Occupations examined in the case studies: The research delved into a diverse set of fields to provide a rich understanding of the varying contexts of feminization:
Bank managers (Bird 1990)
Bartenders (Detman 1990)
Systems analysts (Donato 1990a)
Public relations specialists (Donato 1990b)
Pharmacists (Phipps 1990a)
Insurance adjusters/examiners (Phipps 1990b)
Typesetters/compositors (Roos 1990)
Insurance salespersons (Thomas 1990)
Real estate salespersons (Thomas and Reskin 1990)
Bakers (Steiger and Reskin 1990)
Book editors (Reskin and Roos 1990)
Print and broadcast reporters
Accountants.
Queuing Perspective
Definition and Structure: The queuing perspective conceptualizes labor markets not as a simple supply-and-demand interaction, but as a system where both workers and jobs are ranked:
Labor queues (employer rankings of workers): Employers create internal rankings or preferences for potential employees based on various criteria, which can include qualifications, experience, and even non-economic factors like gender or race.
Job queues (worker rankings of jobs): Conversely, workers also rank available jobs based on their desirability, considering factors like wages, benefits, working conditions, prestige, and career advancement opportunities.
This concept originated in Lester Thurow’s foundational work on race and unemployment, which highlighted how non-economic factors influence hiring, and was further developed by researchers like Hodge (1973) and Lieberson (1980).
Clarification on Queuing Dynamics:
Employers hire from the highest ranks in the labor queue: When an employer needs to fill a position, they ideally attempt to hire the most preferred candidates from their labor queue first. Only if these top-ranked candidates are unavailable or decline the offer do they move down the queue to less preferred applicants.
Workers accept the best job offers available to them: Simultaneously, workers aim to secure the most desirable jobs based on their personal rankings in the job queue. This dynamic leads to a hierarchical distribution of job assignments, where the most sought-after jobs are generally filled by the highest-ranked workers, and less desirable jobs are left for those lower in the labor queue or for whom better opportunities are not available.
Process Implications:
The better, more desirable jobs tend to be allocated to higher-ranked workers, reinforcing existing social hierarchies.
Lower-ranked workers may become unemployed, accept less desirable roles, or be in precarious employment due to their position in the labor queue and the limited availability of high-ranking jobs.
Structural Characteristics of Queues
Three key properties of both labor and job queues are crucial for understanding their dynamics and impact on occupational segregation:
Ordering of Elements: This refers to the specific criteria and priorities used to rank workers and jobs. For workers, it might be skills, experience, and perceived reliability, while for jobs, it could be pay, prestige, or working conditions. Gender, race, and other social categories can significantly influence this ordering, often placing certain groups at a disadvantage.
Overlap: This indicates the strength of preference between job applicants of differing group memberships. For example, how much better a male applicant must be (in employer's perception) to be preferred over a female applicant, given equal formal qualifications. Overlap reveals the intensity of biases and discriminatory preferences.
Shape: This property is influenced by the demographic composition and the relative numbers of available jobs and workers in each subgroup. The shape dictates how much competition exists at different ranks and how far employers or workers must go down their respective queues.
For example, if desirable jobs significantly outnumber qualified workers (e.g., during periods of economic boom or skill shortages), employers are forced to select candidates from lower ranks in their labor queue than usual, potentially leading to increased opportunities for historically lower-ranked groups.
Illustration of Queue Dynamics (Figure 102.1)
The panels in Figure 102.1 are designed to visually demonstrate how variations in queue shapes—while maintaining constant orders in the queues—can profoundly impact an individual's access to varying desirable occupations.
Scenario A2/B1: This specific scenario illustrates a situation where the number of good jobs available significantly outnumbers the supply of traditionally qualified or top-ranked workers. In such a scenario, employers face a labor shortage for desirable positions, which inherently leads to a dilution of hiring standards. They are compelled to draw from lower ranks of their labor queues, opening doors for workers who might otherwise have been bypassed (e.g., women or minority groups).
Conversely, a bottom-heavy job queue (meaning there are many undesirable jobs and few highly desirable ones) implies that only the absolute top-ranked individuals in the labor queue will secure the most attractive positions, intensifying competition and reinforcing existing hierarchies.
Gender Effects in Labor Queues
Gendered influences on employment decisions exist within labor queues: This means that gender is not merely a descriptive characteristic but an active factor that shapes how individuals are perceived and ranked.
Gender plays a role not only in the formal ranking positions (e.g., job titles, pay grades) but also in the everyday, often conventional, hiring practices and promotions within organizations.
Evidence indicates that male workers can effectively subordinate women due to biases rooted in social power dynamics. These biases are often unconscious or deeply embedded in organizational culture, leading to the devaluation of women's skills, the creation of barriers to entry or advancement, and the perpetuation of male-dominated occupational norms.
Non-Economic Factors Affecting Rankings
Economic considerations do not solely drive employers’ rankings of workers: While efficiency and profitability are important, employers' decisions are significantly influenced by a range of non-economic factors.
Preconceived stereotypes and biases: Employers often harbor stereotypes about gender roles, capabilities, and suitable occupations. For instance, women might be stereotyped as less committed to careers or as better suited for nurturing roles, affecting their placement in labor queues for leadership or technical positions.
Working conditions, autonomy, social status, and career opportunities: These factors critically shape how workers evaluate and rank jobs (forming their 'job queue'). A job offering high autonomy and prestige, even if not the highest paying, might be ranked highly by workers. Conversely, jobs with poor working conditions or limited career prospects will be ranked lower, making them less attractive to top-ranked workers and potentially leading to higher turnover rates, which can then open them up to lower-ranked groups.
Queuing Models and Economic Theory
Comparison to Neoclassical Economic Theory:
Neoclassical views generally assume perfectly rational decision-making among workers and employers, based primarily on maximizing utility and profit, with a strong emphasis on lifetime earnings as the primary driver for occupational choices.
Queuing theory provides a more nuanced approach: It accommodates the complex social structures underpinning segregation, explicitly integrating power dynamics among conflicting groups (employers, male workers, female workers). It recognizes that factors beyond rational economic calculations, such as social norms, biases, and power struggles, significantly affect labor market outcomes.
Highlights how preferences and biases affect decision-making beyond economic rationale: Unlike neoclassical models that might struggle to explain persistent wage gaps for equally productive workers, queuing theory inherently accounts for how subjective preferences, discriminatory biases, and social hierarchies influence hiring and job allocation.
Regarding occupational feminization, queuing theory redirects focus from merely analyzing female worker characteristics (e.g., their skills or willingness to work for lower wages) to understanding the structural properties of labor markets themselves, specifically how these are influenced by employer preferences and the preferences and resistance of male workers.
Power Dynamics in Labor Queues
Competing Interests in Labor Queues
The allocation of jobs and the dynamics of labor queues are driven by the often-competing interests of three main stakeholders:
Employers (predominantly male): Primarily concerned with minimizing labor costs and maximizing productivity, but also influenced by social preferences.
Male workers: Often focused on maintaining their privileged positions, higher wages, and avoiding competition from women.
Female workers: Seeking equal opportunities, fair wages, and access to desirable jobs.
This creates an inherent imbalance in power dynamics, which historically and structurally favors employers and the male cohort when determining job assignments and shaping the overall structure of labor queues.
Employers’ Preferences and Motivations
Employers generally aim to minimize labor costs and maximize efficiency, which aligns with economic rationality. However, this is often complicated by social factors.
Male employers, who typically dominate workforce hierarchies, often exhibit resistance to fully integrating female workers into male-dominated positions due to several reasons:
Maintaining male privilege: Integrating women can threaten the established social order and the perceived superiority or entitlement of male workers in certain fields.
Gender segregation’s role in legitimizing unequal treatment: Segregation provides an ideological framework that justifies lower wages, limited career progression, and less desirable job assignments for women, framing these as natural outcomes rather than discriminatory practices.
Male Workers' Role
Male workers’ interests frequently diverge, placing them in a precarious position vis-à-vis employers, while also creating an adversarial relationship with female workers stemming from the fear of competition.
Enabling gender segregation provides male workers with clear economic advantages, such as:
Higher wages for similar or less demanding work.
Greater job security and promotion prospects.
Access to more desirable jobs (e.g., those with higher autonomy, better working conditions, or more prestige) that are less likely to be offered to women.
Coalition Impact
The collaboration, often tacit, between male workers and employers serves to perpetuate occupational segregation. Male workers can exert influence through informal networks, union resistance, or social pressure.
This leads to male workers gathering consensus to actively delay or resist the hiring of women unless external pressures, such as severe labor shortages or strong anti-discrimination legislation, emerge to make such resistance too costly for employers.
Shifts in economic conditions can trigger changes: Employers may begin to favor women for hiring when the tangible costs of maintaining existing gender hierarchies (e.g., inability to find male workers, losing out on talented female labor, legal penalties) demonstrably outweigh the perceived benefits (e.g., maintaining male worker morale, preserving status quo). This was often seen during heightened economic competition or demographic shifts in the 1970s, which incentivized employers to tap into the female labor pool.
Examples of Resistance and Integration
Male resistance varies based on occupation context: The intensity and form of resistance to women's entry are not uniform across all male-dominated fields.
Informal networks blocking women’s entrance: In highly sought-after areas, particularly those with high status, good pay, or strong occupational identity (e.g., production baking, commercial real estate), male workers often use informal social networks and exclusionary practices to actively block women’s entry, making it difficult for women to even learn about opportunities or gain vital mentorship.
Less opposition where turnover is high or growth is stable: Conversely, in occupations characterized by high turnover rates, lower prestige, or stable, less competitive growth (e.g., certain clerical positions, lower-tier service roles), women often face less direct opposition. These jobs become 'feminized' as men move into more desirable roles or as the occupations become less attractive to the male labor queue.
Conclusions from Case Studies
The comprehensive data from the case studies indicates several critical findings:
Women enter male-dominated fields primarily when those fields become less attractive to male incumbents: This is a powerful structural finding. It suggests that feminization often occurs not due to a proactive will for gender equality, but because the jobs become less desirable (e.g., lower pay, worse working conditions, reduced prestige, or mechanization) for the men historically dominant in those fields. Men move up or out, creating vacancies that women then fill.
In occupations with marked feminization, women often find themselves concentrated in the least desirable roles while men retain higher status jobs: Even when women enter a feminizing occupation, they are typically shunted into lower-paying, less prestigious, or more precarious segments of that profession. For example, in pharmacy, women might dominate retail roles while men retain hospital or management positions. This phenomenon further reinforces the idea that structural disparities persist even within seemingly integrated fields.
It is important to recognize that fluctuations in statistics regarding occupational segregation do not necessarily indicate genuine progress towards gender equality. These shifts often mask underlying structural disparities and the reallocation of women into less desirable segments of an occupation.
This emphasizes the need for careful and nuanced analysis in understanding the true dynamics of gender in the workforce, moving beyond simple numerical counts to examine the quality of jobs, pay equity, and career advancement opportunities for men and women.