Editor—Heath expresses many misconceptions about women in the workplace.1 Women are compelled to look after their children, work part time, earn less money, and do different jobs from men. Better state support for childrearing, she implies, would produce equality in the workplace.
Many legitimate factors cause sex differences in earnings and occupations. Women earn less because they work fewer hours, have less experience, work in less-risky jobs, have more career interruptions, and attach less weight to salary. Different interests lead men and women to select different jobs.2
Heath complains that men abandon occupations when women enter them. However, changes in occupations themselves may be responsible. In the United States, pharmacy has become increasingly female, not because women make the profession less attractive to men but because the profession consists decreasingly of owners of small businesses and increasingly of employees of chain stores.3 Men tend to favour the autonomy and entrepreneurship of business ownership, whereas women like the lower risk and flexibility of employment.
Figure 1.
Many mothers do not want to work when their children are young, and many women prefer to work part time.4 Like women, men must choose between personal commitments and professional power, but men are more inclined to choose professional power.
Family policies will not necessarily have the desired effect. Policies facilitating childbearing often increase fertility,5 which may attenuate women's workplace attachment. Increasing the proportion of the population employed in childcare would likely increase occupational segregation, as in Sweden, because women fill most childcare jobs.
Heath's goal—parity of wages and occupations to afford genuine choice—contradicts itself. For both biological and social reasons, men and women have different preferences. When they act on their preferences, they choose differently. Only by constraining preferences—the antithesis of affording “genuine choice”—can workplace outcomes be rendered identical.
Competing interests: None declared.
References
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