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Women's Unemployment Patterns in Postwar Business Cycles: Class Difference, The Gender Segregation of Work and Deindustrialization

Wheaton College, Norton, MA 02766

This paper argues that the gender difference in unemployment rates over postwar business cycles and the changes in that differential in the 1980s (women's unemployment rates dropping below men's rates during the recession) can be explained by the continuing gender segregation of work and deindustrialization. My version of the segmentation hypothesis finds empirical support in the average pattern of men's and women's total unemployment rates, in the gender unemployment rate patterns for major occupational groups and in the fact that working-class women's unemployment rates have dropped below working-class men's rates during most postwar recessions. In addition, econometric analysis shows a tight fit between the gender differential in unemployment rates and deindustrialization, a variable whose explanatory power is rooted in the gender segregation of work. The final section of the paper assesses the implications of my findings for the other two major explanations of the effect of recessions on women: the buffer hypothesis and the substitution hypothesis.

Review of Radical Political Economics, Vol. 22, No. 4, 87-110 (1990)
DOI: 10.1177/048661349002200406


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