Gender and Ethnicity in Labor Markets: Inequality and Discrimination, Slides of Economic Sociology

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Lecture Note 10

Gendered Labor Market

Ethnicized Labor Market

Main Issues

A. Gendered Labor Market

1. Two competing paradigms on gendered

labor market--emphasize the

organizational inequality approach

(Bridges and Nelson’s research)

2. Gender and Work in Hong Kong

B. Ethnicized Labor Market (Emily Honig’s

research on Shanghai)

Labor Market Theories

• --Some argue that employers have the right to

discriminate to pursue efficiency (such as Richard Epstein)

• --tainted market theories (supply and demand are

important for wage determination, but that external, invidious forces intervene in market processes to the detriment of those working in predominantly female jobs): employers’ discrimination is not allowed. Cultural bias is costly in markets and will tend to be driven out by the forces of competition

• --Comparable worth theories however argue that the pay

of predominantly female jobs should be increased so as to match that of male jobs (such as Paula England)

Comparable Worth Theories (1)

• Three assumptions:
• 1. the idea of cultural devaluation (not only women as a gender but every feminine, including female skills, traits, and tasks, are undervalued by society and male decision makers
• 2. the proposition that this devaluation insinuates itself into the wage determination process by affecting the kinds of judgments that are made in the job evaluation schemes found among major employers
• 3. the diminished wages that accompany cultural devaluation become a marketwide phenomenon. The discrimination in question flows from cultural sources. As elements of a cultural system, the beliefs involved can be seen both as pervasive and as unconsciously held. Because they are socialized into these belief systems as children, adult decision makers of either gender may put them into play without even realizing that they are doing so Docsity.com

The Organizational Inequality

Paradigm

• Noneconomic influences on pay levels are

systematically linked to the interests of

organizational constituencies and are

important sources of wage differences

• 1. Bureaucratic Politics
• 2. Organizational Reproduction of Culture

Bridges and Nelson’s

Organizational Inequality Theory

• 1. Bureaucratic Politics
• Bureaucratic politics are influential participants

in salary setting (e. g. the main actors in many

large organizations would include staff officials

within personnel departments, line officials in

various departments, senior management,

employee unions, and other activist groups)

A. the imbalance of political resources between the incumbents of predominantly male and predominantly female jobs can generate economic inequality between men and women

Bridges and Nelson’s

Organizational Inequality Theory

• 2. The Organizational Reproduction of Culture
• Women occupy a cultural position that devalues their economic contributions
• The general cultural disparagement of things feminine has its most pronounced influence on pay disparities in interaction with the culture and structure of employing organizations (in other words, the organization’s normative and structural aspects of its environment determines the degree of sexual inequality)
• E. g. proportion of women workers may be higher in one industry (such as electronic) but lower in others (such as automobile). Women workers are recruited in some times (such as World War II.) but are not welcomed in some other times (such as the Great Depression)

Bridges and Nelson’s

Organizational Inequality Theory

• Internal labor markets are important of how

organizations mediate the effect of labor

markets:

• When workforce is made up of internal labor

market, in which workers are hired for entry-level

positions but then progress up a series of

organization-specific job ladders, many jobs in

the organizations cannot be readily compared

with jobs in the external market. In large

organizations, internal labor markets function to

decouple pay setting from the market

Family and Hong Kong’s Economy

• The prevalence of family-owned enterprises
• Family is regarded as an option of last resort in

of government’s social security assistance

• The inheritance laws in the New Territories in

Hong Kong still deprive women of the right to

inherit their family property

• Gender stereotyping images and textbooks—

emphasize women’s subordinate role

Work-family conflict for married

women with paid work

• In general, women with paid work have

gained more influence and power over

family matter. However, these women are

still expected to play out their traditional

family roles and they are still responsible

for childcare and housework

• It is believed that women are responsible

for housework regardless of their

employment status

Ethnicized Labor Market in China (1)

• Chinese urban history is replete with instances

of labor markets divided by native-place cliques

• The native-place based ethnic identity is not

essential. It labeled only after people from the

same place flock to a new area (mostly a city)

• How the boundary is demarcated? 1. Earlier

arrivals controlled the most lucrative economic

opportunities, they also unified to prevent the

competition for the resources from late comers;

2. “Insider”/”outsider” (or “native”/”immigrant”)

identity and division

Ethnicized Labor Market in China (2)

• Patterns of economic specialization by native place are keys to understand “ethnic division of labor” in urban China in late imperial period till 1949 (W. G. Skinner): see case studies in Beijing (D. Strand), Hankou (W. Rowe), Singapore, Penang and Malacca (Mak Lau Fong), Hong Kong (E. Sinn, C. F. Blake [New Territories], D. W. Sparks [Teochew]) and Taiwan (D. Ownby and S. Harrell, Hill Gates)
• In contemporary China, especially after 1978, first time since the revolution of 1949 that peasants could leave their rural homes to seek jobs in cities—native-place based ethnic status becomes important, once again

Migration and Urban Labor Markets

in Contemporary China (1)

• Background information:
• After the revolution of 1949, the CCP undertook extensive efforts to curb the flow of rural migrants to urban areas. The policy was reinforced after the practice of the household registration system (戶口制度) from 1958
• Things changed after 1978. From then on, a significant amount of peasants left their rural homes to work in cities. By 1988, migrants represented nearly one-fourth of the population of China’s cities with populations over 1,000,000.
• They were surplus labor in rural areas. Employment in agriculture and rural industry cannot absorb these laborers

Migration and Urban Labor Markets

in Contemporary China (2)

• What kinds of jobs these people would

take?

• Migrants congregate in the lowest-status, least lucrative, and most physically demanding jobs
• Young urban residents prefer to seek employment in the foreign- dominated sector of the labor market. They regard those jobs taken by immigrants as “heavy and dirty jobs”
• Most work that can be classified as jobs in the “secondary labor market”
• E. g. Factories established by Hong Kong investors in the Pearl River Delta could not attract local people. Most workers came from Hunan, Sichuan, Anhui, Henan and Jiangxi. Workers from the same area tend to live together and to congregate in the same workshops of particular factories