Sex differences in the Canadian occupational attainment process

Sex differences in the Canadian occupational attainment process*

M o N I c A B o Y D

En utilisant des donnCes de l’Ctude de 1973 sur la mobiliti: au Canada, ce papier compare les processus de rialisation occupationnelle des Canadiens de naissance, fCminins et masculins, Pgts entre 35 et 49 ans et employ& B plein temps. Les rialisa- tions des femmes et des hommes sont examides dabord avec un modkle de base dans lequel le statut occupationnel actuel est regress6 au statut du premier emploi, de l’instruction refue, du statut occupationnel du pere, du niveau d’instruction des parents, et du nombre de freres et soeurs. La seconde partie du texte Ctend le modele de rialisation occupationnelle pour inclure l‘impact de la participation de la mere au march6 du travail, du nombre d’annCes passes au march6 du travail par le rCpondant, et du statut matrimonial. L’analyse appuye d’une facon limit6e le modele de realisation du ’meme-sexe’ dans lequel les caqctCristiques paternelles ont une influence plus grande sur les rCalisations du fils que sur celles de la fille, et vice-versa quand il s’agit des caractkristiques maternelles. L‘analyse dCmontre aussi que le statut matrimonial stratifie int6rieurement la population Mminine relativement au processus des rCali- sations occupationnelles et ce, soutout parce que les femmes mariCes qui occupent un emploi i plein temps ne sont pas typiques de toutes les femmes mariCes.

Carleton University

Using data from the 1973 Canadian Mobility Study, this paper compares the occupational attainment processes of native-born, full-time paid men and women aged 35-49. The attainments of men and women are examined, first with a baseline model

* Revision of a paper ’Occupational attainment of native-born Canadian women’ which was presented at the 1977 Canadian Sociological and anthropological Association meeting, Fredericton, New Brunswick. The author thanks Carl Cuneo, David L. Featherman, Elizabeth Humphreys, Hugh A. McRoberts, Judah Matras, and John Myles for their helpful comments on earlier versions and Bonnie Shiell and Gillian Stevens who were research assistants. The data analyzed in this paper are from the Canadian Mobility Study of which the principal investigators were Monica Boyd, John Goyder, Frank E. Jones, Hugh A. McRoberts, Peter C. Pineo, and John Porter. The research presented in this paper was supported by the Canada Council grant for the Canadian Mobility Study, #S73-1894, by the Center for Demography and Ecology, University of Wisconsin, Madison, under NIH Center Grant #HDo5876, and by a faculty computer account at Carleton University. This paper was received January 1979, and accepted October 1979.

Rev. canad. SOC. & AnthKanad. Rev. SOC. & Anth. 19(1) 1982

2 MONICABOYD

in which current occupational status is regressed on first job status, education, father’s occupational status, parental education, and number of siblings. The second part of the paper extends the model of occupational attainment to include the impact of mother’s labour force participation, years spent in the labour force by the respondent and marital status. The analysis offers limited support for the ‘like-sex’ model of attainment in which paternal characteristics have more influence on the attainments of sons than on the attainments of daughters, and vice versa for maternal characteristics. The analysis also finds that marital status internally stratifies the female population with respect to the process of occupational attainment, largely because married women in the full-time paid labour force are not typical of all married women.

Prior to the mid-r96os, the sociological study of women was confined primarily to the area of marriage and the family. Reflecting the dominant assumption that women were largely irrelevant in the area of stratification research, little attention was paid to male-female social and economic inequalities. However, growth in the labour force participation of women made this position increasingly tenuous (Acker, 1973). Today, various theoretical frameworks exist concerning sexual stratification in the labour force and a diversity of topics are now researched, ranging from the consideration of women as a class or caste, women as part of the reserve army, the sex-specific dimensions of status and prestige, to male-female occupational and income inequalities.

One framework used to research sex differences in occupational stratification is the status attainment model. This model conceptualizes current occupational status as a function of prior statuses, notably the socio-economic status of the family of origin, and the subsequent educational and first job achievements (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Duncan, Featherman, and Duncan, 1972: 5-15; Horan, 1978). Whether or not men and women differ in how they obtain occupational status on the basis of their achieved and ascribed characteristics, such as education and family background variables is one of the questions addressed by this perspective. As a result of the impetus provided by the 1962 Occupational Change in a Generation Study (Blau and Duncan, 1967), most studies utilizing the occupational attainment framework to compare men and women have analyzed American data (Feather- man and Hauser, 1976b; Marini, 1980; McClendon, 1976; Sewell, Hauser and Wolf, 1980; Treas and Tyree, 1979; Treiman and Terrill, 1975). Several investigations bearing on the occupational attainment processes of Canadian men and women have been conducted (Cuneo and Curtis, 1975; Marsden, Harvey, and Charner, 1975)~ but have been limited by small restricted samples. This paper augments this Canadian research by analyzing the occupational attainment processes of native-born men and women using the national 1973 Canadian Mobility Survey (Boyd et al., 1977).

In addition to presenting national estimates of sex differences in attainments, this paper also modifies the usual status attainment model to more fully capture the experiences of women. This refinement is achieved by including variables omitted in research on the occupational attainments of men and by assessing how martial-related roles affect female occupational attainments. With respect to the inclusion of new variables, many of the initial studies comparing the occupational attainments of men and women examined a model which specified occupational

3 SEX DIFFERENCES I N OCCUPATIONAL ATTAINMENT PROCESS

status as the outcome of a limited number of variables, notably first job, education, and family of origin characteristics such as paternal educational and occupational status, and number of siblings (Featherman and Hauser, 1976b; Treas and Tyree, 1979; Wang 1973). The original model originates from the Blau-Duncan (1967) investigation of male occupational attainment, and it omits the socio-economic characteristics of the mother as part of the family of origin characteristics. But increasingly studies now include maternal education and maternal labour-force involvement in models of occupational attainment, for two reasons (Cuneo and Curtis, 1975; Marini, 1980; McClendon, 1976; Sewell, Hauser, and Wolf, 1980; Treiman and Terrill, 1975). First, maternal characteristics provide additional information on the family of origin. If a mother worked, one consequence may be an augmentation of financial resources available to the offspring which affects subsequent educational and occupational statuses. Second, to the extent that mothers serve as role models for daughters, maternal characteristics may be especially important for understanding female labour-force involvement and occupational experiences (Marini, 1980; Rosenfeld, 1978; Stevens and Boyd, 1980). When maternal characteristics are included in status attainment models, researchers allude to the possibility of ‘like-sex effects’ in which the characteristics of the mothers influence the attainments of the daughters more than do paternal characteristics, with the reverse for sons (Marini, 1980; McClendon, 1976; Rosenfeld, 1978; Sewell, Hauser, and Wolf, 1980; Stevens and Boyd, 1980; Treiman and Terrill, 1975).

In addition to the inclusion of maternal characteristics, the sexual division of labour with respect to breadwinner, homemaker, childbearer, and childrearer roles also suggests an elaboration of the usual occupational attainment model. The multiplicity of social roles assumed by married women (wife, mother, job holder) may have a depressant effect on the acquisition of occupational status either because time and energy cannot be directed solely to job performance or because familial demands allocate women to occupations which are viewed as compatible with wife and mother roles (see Hudis, 1976; Marini, 1980; Spitze and Waite, 1980). Reflecting these sex-specific labour-force experiences, investigations of male-female status attainments now frequently include years in the labour force and career contingency variables such as marital status, and number of children as variables affecting occupational and income statuses of women (Featherman and Hauser, 1976a; Hudis, 1976; Marini, 1980; McClendon, 1976; Sewell, Hauser, and Wolf, 1980; Suter and Miller, 1973; Waite, 1975; Wolf, 1976).

DATA A N D METHODOLOGY

The data analyzed in this paper are from the 1973 Canadian Mobility Study which was designed as national investigation into the socio-economic achievement of the adult Canadian population. The survey was fielded by Statistics Canada which arranged to distribute an eight-page questionnaire as a supplement to their July 1973 Labour Force Survey (for further details, see Boyd and McRoberts, 1974; Boyd, et al., 1977). Unlike the 1962 and the 1973 studies in the United States (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Featherman and Hauser, 1978), the questionnaires were answered by female as well as male adult members of a household. As a result, the

4 M O N I C A B O Y D

Canadian data are especially informative with respect to the occupational attainment process for women, providing information on family of origin characteristics, respondent's education, first job and current occupational status for approximately 23,000 female and 22,000 male respondents aged 18 years and older.

Since education and occupation of both parents and respondents are major variables in the analysis, a brief consideration of their measurement is warranted. Education is derived from an eighteen-category classification, which then is scaled to approximate years of schooling. Occupational status is measured by the Blishen-McRoberts scale (Blishen and McRoberts, 1976) which is similar to the Duncan (1961) socio-economic index used in American research. The derivation of these indices raises two questions concerning the use of socio-economic indices in comparisons of male and female occupational attainments. First, socio-economic indices are generated by regressing the ranking of a limited number of occupations on the education and income of males in each occupational category. Because a male reference population is used to construct the socio-economic indices, the question arises as to whether these scales are appropriate measures of occupational status for women (see Guppy and Siltanen, 1977). After constructing and criticizing two socio-economic scales specific to employed Canadian men and women, Blishen and Carroll (1978) conclude that on average the socio-economic scores for men and women are quite similar, and that either the male-derived index (Blishen-McRoberts, 1976) or the female derived index may be used in analyses of male-female status attainments. Similar conclusions are reached by Boyd and McRoberts (1982) who compare male-female occupational attainment models using both the Blishen-McRoberts male-derived and the Blishen-Carroll female- derived scales. As a result, the analysis presented here uses the Blishen-McRoberts socio-economic index (for additional support for this position, see McClendon, 1976: 53-4; Treiman and Terrill, 1975: 175-6). In addition to the reference population used, the sensitivity of socio-economic

indices in detecting male-female labour force inequalities also is questioned (Boyd and McRoberts, 1982; Sewell, Hauser, and Wolf, 1980; Treas and Tyree, 1979). The similarities between men and women in occupational status and in the acquisition of status which is generally observed in studies of male-female occupational attainments (Cuneo and Curtis, 1975; Featherman and Hauser, i975b; McClendon, 1976; Treas and Tyree, 1979; Treiman and Terrill, 1975; Wang, 1973) contrast sharply with sex segregation of occupations (Armstrong and Armstrong, 1975) and with marked male-female inequalities in income, job autonomy, job security, and promotional opportunities (Gunderson, 1976; Suter and Miller, 1973; Wolf and Fligstein, i979a; 197913; Wolf and Rosenberg, 1978). The contrast is not surprising since by their very construction, socio-economic indices will not capture all aspects of male-female inequalities in the labour force. The hierarchy of occupations scaled by socio-economic indices closely corresponds to the perceived 'goodness' of an occupation - a goodness which is evaluated in terms of the socio-economic attributes and desirability of the occupation in question (see Featherman and Hauser, 1976a; Featherman, Jones, and Hauser, 1976; Goldthorpe and Hope, 1972). By virtue of the occupational metric used, and the theoretical framework employed (Horan, 1978), analyses of male-female

5 S E X D I F F E R E N C E S I N O C C U P A T I O N A L A T T A I N M E N T PROCESS

occupational status attainments do not, and cannot, directly measure other dimensions of sexual inequality such as access to elite occupations, sex segregation, and reduced mobility opportunities due to participation in a secondary versus a primary labour market. However, as shown in this paper and elsewhere (Sewell, Hauser, and Wolf, 1980), socio-economic indices are not wholly insensitive to these features of labour-force inequality. Occupational status distributions, inter- and intra-generational changes in occupational status, and models of attainment show sex differences which are remarkably consistent with these other features of sex inequalities.

As noted earlier, the occupational attainment framework seeks to study the mechanisms through which individual characteristics (family of origin characteristics, education, first job) affect subsequent occupational attainment. The procedure used in this paper is to depict the process of occupational attainment by constructing structural equation models for males and females. Three analytical conventions are employed throughout this analysis. First, the data are weighted by a system which first provides representative population estimates but which then downweights the numbers by a factor of d300 to approximate those of the original sample (see Featherman and Hauser, 1978: 511). Second, metric coefficients are not considered to be substantively interesting or statistically significant unless they are more than twice their standard errors. Third, because of the interest in comparing male-female models, listwise deletion procedures are used in the regression analysis. Unlike pairwise deletion, listwise deletion permits testing across populations to determine if sex differences in metric coefficients are significant statistically by the use of the increment in R' test (Cohen, 1968; Gujarati, 1970). One cost of such a procedure is a loss of cases since those respondents who fail to answer a question are deleted from any analysis using that variable. The proportion of the population excluded from the analysis changes with the number of variables, but approximately twenty-five per cent of the sample reporting occupation is excluded because of non-response on one or more of the independent variables.'

As a precursor to a more exhaustive analysis, this paper focuses upon the occupational attainments of men and women age 35-49 in 1973. The rationale for the selection of this age group is twofold. First, any study of occupational attainment must deal with cohort effects. The fact that birth cohorts experience different social economic conditions is a strong argument for examining the occupational attainment processes of each cohort separately. The choice of this particular fifteen-year age group is based on a second consideration, namely the minimization of confounding effects. If the experiences of very young men and women are studied, sex differences in occupational achievement could be obscured because of the short period of time spent in the labour force, or they could be distorted because significant portions of the cohort will not have completed their schooling. Similarly, the occupational attainments of groups near retirement will differ from those of middle-aged cohorts because of selective retirement, death, and the lingering effects of historical events such as the Depression and World War II. The age group 35-49 has none of these difficulties. Born between 1924-38, this cohort entered the labour force primarily after World War 11 and by 1973 were in their mid-career years.


TABLE I CHARACTERISTICS OF FULL-TIME PAID WORKERS BY SEX, AND OF WOMEN IN OR OUT OF THE LABOUR FORCE, AGE 35-49 AND NATIVE BORN, CANADA 1973

In the Labour Force

Characteristics

~ ~

Full Time Paid” Otherb Females Not

Male Female Female Force in the Labour

Means and Standard Deviations Mother’s Education

Father’s Education

Father’s Occupation‘

Number of Siblings

Respondent’s Education

Respondent’s First Jobc

Respondent’s Current Jobc

Number of Years Workedd

Number of Children

Percentage Mother Worked’

Yes No

Marital Status‘ Single Married Other

7.16 (3.52) 6.85

(3.78) 34.34 (12.73)

4.90

10.29 (3.72) 37.95

(13.52) 44.00 (14.59) 22.46 (6.79)

(3.39)

-

100.0 13.6 86.4

100.0 6.9

90.8 2.3

7.83

7.26 (3.88) 35.23 (13.35)

4.82

10.91 (2.95) 43.40

(12.39) 45.20 (12.54) 14.43 (8.23) 2.99

(1.92)

(3.57)

(3.35)

100.0 18.4 81.6

100.0 12.0 73.6 14.4

7.02 (3.44) 6.98

(3.74) 33.47 (12.46)

4.88 (3.36) 10.38

42.06 (1 2.46) 41. 878 (11.53)

9.33 (6.72) 3.48

(1.84)

(3.04)

100.0 14.2 85.8

100.0 5.8

91.5 4.7

7.08

6.75

34.18 (12.58)

5.25 (3.51) 9.67

(3.23) 41.15 (12.24)

(3.54)

(3.79)

-

7.84 (5.89) 3.62

(1.99)

100.0 14.7 85.3

100.0 1.9

93.2 4.9

‘Includes self-employed. bunpaid family workers, part time workers. ‘Measured as Blishen-McRoberts (1976) socio-economic indices. dDefined as working full time, seven months or more out of each year. ‘Based on the mother working full time at some point during the respondent’s elementary or secondary schooling. ‘Based on the labour force survey to which the Canadian Mobility Questionaire was appended. gNon-response to current occupation is very high for unpaid family workers or part time workers. See text.

7 S E X D I F F E R E N C E S I N O C C U P A T I O N A L A T T A I N M E N T P R O C E S S

The population under study is also limited by nativity and labour-force status. Only native-born men and women are considered, as previous research suggests that occupational attainment processes are quite different for foreign-born workers (see Boyd, 1980a; 1980b; Li, 1978,1979; Richmond, 1967). In addition, only wage, salary or self-employed workers who are in the labour force full time are studied. The decision to consider only full-time, paid workers over-simplifies the complex nature of female labour-force participation since it ignores the experiences of native-born women who were in the July 1973 labour force as part-time or unpaid family workers. Because part-time work is more characteristic of women than men, normally this excluded group should be part of an analysis of female occupational attainment. The exclusion of part-time workers is done for two reasons. First, it permits comparisons of men and women which hold constant the level of labour-force involvement. Second, 42 per cent of the 1973 female labour force in part-time work and 74 per cent in unpaid family work did not give their occupation.’ The extremely high non-response rate for women in part-time and unpaid family work makes questionable their inclusion in the analysis.

The final sample, then, includes 4,339 males and 1,270 females representing approximately 1,300,000 and 390,000 workers in the July 1973 labour force. Characteristics of the women who are included and excluded in the analysis are presented in Table I. Compared to other women, women who are in the full-time paid labour force come from higher social origins (measured by parental education, number of siblings, and occupational status), are more likely to have had a mother who worked, have had more education and higher first job statuses and have been in the labour force longer. They also have fewer children and are less likely to be married. Because women who are in the full-time paid labour force are an ’advantaged’ group in terms of their labour-force characteristics, a comparison of their occupational achievements with those of males will tend to minimize male-female differences. Any differences which favour women in this analysis can be assumed to be over-estimates of the situation in the labour force as a whole since the women who are excluded are part-time and unpaid family workers with lower status occupations and less advantaged social origins and educational achievements. Similarly any observed deficits experienced by women in this analysis can be assumed to be underestimates of the situation in the labour force as a whole (see Marini, 1980). However, the restricted nature of male-female comparisons should not be unduly exaggerated. Women in the full-time paid labour force were 70 per cent of the native-born female labour force in the 35-49 age group in 1973.

O R I G I N S A N D DESTINATIONS: M E N A N D W O M E N I N CANADA’S L A B O U R F O R C E

We begin our comparison by considering the typical origin and destination statuses of men and women which are presented in Table I. The data show that on the average, females come from slightly higher social origins than do their male counterparts (Table I, columns I and 2) and they also have slightly higher education. The status of first occupation is much higher for women than men, in excess of five Blishen-McRoberts points. However, the relatively higher status of first job does not last for women. The average current occupational status of


women is only about one Blishen-McRoberts point higher than that of men (45.2 versus 4.0).

These comparisons highlight two aspects of male-female occupational attainments. First, men and women are very similar with respect to average background characteristics, educational attainment, and current occupational attainment. The slightly higher current occupational status of women is consistent with their slightly higher social origin and educational characteristics. However, these observations do not necessarily mean that the occupational attainment process is identical for men and women since similarity in outcome may be produced in quite different ways. Here the comparisons made between men and women using data in Table I are instructive for a second time. The occupational characteristics suggest a pattern of occupational mobility in which women do much better than men with respect to their first job status but over the occupational life cycle lose this initial large advantage. To illustrate, the first job status of women is on the average 8.2 Blishen-McRoberts points higher than their fathers’ occupational status, whereas the first job status of sons is only 3.6 points higher than their father’s. But by the time of the current job, the father-offspring gap in occupational status differs slightly by sex (9.7 for males compared to 10.0 for females). These changes reflect the depressed career mobility of women compared to men. Between first job and current occupation, average occupational status increases by 1.8 points for women and 6 points for men. The Blishen-McRoberts (1976) distributions presented in Table 11 provide additional information on these differences in intra-career mobility of women and men. The smaller standard deviations for women on both first and current job are indicative of the fact that women are clustered in the middle three categories (30-59 points) and underrepre- sented in the lowest and the highest categories (10-29 and 60-70 points). Between first and current job, there is a shift out of the low end of the status distribution into the middle and higher status categories for men whereas the distribution for women barely changes. The stability of the first and current occupational distributions for women also is shown by their continued underrepresentation in the high status categories of the Blishen-McRoberts distributions.

Table 11 also presents the male and female occupational distributions using the occupational classification devised by Pineo, Porter, and McRoberts (1977). In displaying the sex segregation of occupations, these distributions shed considerable light on the patterns of occupational mobility which are observed for men and women. For both first and current job, about 50 per cent of the women in our sample are in skilled and semi-skilled white-collar occupations compared to 16 per cent of the males for first job and xi per cent for current job. The concentration of women in white-collar occupations and their absence from others (farming, skilled crafts and trades, foremen, high and middle-level management) explain the male-female differences observed earlier in father-offspring mobility and in first and current job statuses. Central to this explanation is the tendency of the socio-economic Blishen-McRoberts index to scale white-collar occupations as higher in status than blue-collar occupations (Pineo, Porter and McRoberts, 1977: Table III). As a result, as long as the paternal occupation is used as the benchmark (and as long as many of the fathers are engaged in blue-collar occupations), women

9 SEX DIFFERENCES I N O C C U P A T I O N A L A T T A I N M E N T PROCESS

TABLE I1 DISTRIBUTTON OF BLISHEN SCORES AND OCCUPATIONAL GROUP BY FIRST JOB, CUR- RENT JOB FOR NATIVE BORN MALES AND FEMALES, AGE 35-49, FULL-TIME PAID WORKERS, CANADA, 1973 (PERCENTAGES)

First lob Current lob

Males Females Males Females

BIishen Scores 10-19 1.0 20-29 29.3 30-39 32.4 40-49 17.7 50-59 10.0 60-69 6.7 70-79 2.9

Mean 37.95 Standard Deviation 13.52 Occupational Group' Professional 6.8

Semi- Professional 2.8 Technician 1.8

Supervisor 1.4 Foreman 1.9 Slalled White Collar 4.8 Semi-skilled White Collar 11.1 Unskilled White Collar 4.5 Skilled Crafts and Trades 15.9 Semi-skilled Manual Workers 15.7 Unskilled Manual Workers 21.0 Farmers 3.5 Farm Labour 7.5

High-Level Management .3

Middle-Management 1.0

.1 .5 18.0 16.7 20.5 25.6 20.6 24.6 32.2 13.1 6.9 15.5 1.7 4.0

43.40 44.00 12.39 14.58

6.7 8.4 .3 3.8

8.1 3.3 1.0 1.6 .4 5.4

1.8 7.7 .1 9.4

21.8 4.6 28.9 6.1 11.3 1.7 1.2 18.4 9.4 9.9 8.3 13.0 - 5.6

.7 1.1

.1 15.8 17.8 20.0 33.1 10.9 2.3

45.20 12.55

7.0 1.1 8.2 1.0 1.9 8.8 .8

23.3 24.0 7.2 1.7 8.2 6.5 .1 .2

"Pineo, Porter and McRoberts (1977) classification.

will appear to experience a greater amount of upward intergenerational mobility than do men. These gross mobility patterns are very much a function of the underlying sex-specific occupational segregation of the labour force (Dunton and Featherman, 1980; Tyree and Treas, 1974). The sex segregation of occupations also explains the lower career mobility of women relative to men between first and current job. Despite their higher socio-economic status relative to blue-collar work, female white-collar occupations have a number of characteristics which affect mobility opportunities. Such occupations tend not to offer on-the-job training but rather require that training occur prior to employment. Also, they have poorly developed career trajectories, demand little career commitment, and thus they offer little chance for advancement (Wolf and Rosenfeld, 1978). Given these characteristics, once women initially are allocated into these white-collar jobs, their career mobility is depressed relative to the career mobility of men.


S E X DIFFERENCES I N T H E P R O C E S S OF OCCUPATIONAL ATTAINMENT: A BASELINE M O D E L

Overall, the data contained in Tables I and 11 show that women enter into jobs in the middle levels of the occupational hierarchy and then stay there. These data strongly suggest that men and women differ with respect to the process by which occupational status is attained over the life cycle. Previous stratification research has focused considerable attention on a basic model of the attainment process in which current occupational status is conceptualized as an outcome of family-of- origin characteristics, educational attainments, and first job status (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Boyd et al., 1981; Cuneo and Curtis, 1975). In this model the association between family-of-origin characteristics and the respondent’s occupational status breaks down into the intervening attainments of education and first job status; it is therefore especially useful in showing the mechanisms by which social origins affect the socio-economic statuses of the offspring. Social origin variables are considered to influence the subsequent educational and occupational attainments both because they are indicators of the levels of economic resources in a family and because they also capture role modelling and other socialization effects (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Duncan, Featherman, and Duncan, 1972). Education is included because it represents a resource which is utilized in the labour market. In particular, formal schooling has certification properties which qualify or disqualify eople for certain kinds of occupations. In turn, the status of the first

occupations have career trajectories associated with them (e. g. factory worker to foreman) and in part because the requirements of certain occupations (e.g. ph sician) make recruitment from other occupations (e. g. garment worker)

Analytically, these variables are considered to be sequentially ordered. Educational attainment represents the first stage of socio-economic achievements over the life cycle, first job the next stage occurring after school completion, and so on. This temporal ordering of successive achievements has been depicted graphically by means of path models (see Blau and Duncan, 1967; Cuneo and Curtis, 1975). As shown by these path diagrams, social origin variables and education and first-job attainment influence the current occupational attainment in two possible ways. Past ascribed or achieved statuses can influence current occupational status directly, as is the case when the offspring of a farmer becomes a farmer. And, the past status can affect indirectly the current status of a respondent by virtue of its influence on a temporally prior attainment, such as when a graduate of a teachers’ college becomes a high school principal in later years, largely through the mechanism of becoming a teacher first.

Our analysis begins with this basic model of successive socio-economic achievements so familiar to students of occupational attainment. Table 111 presents the means and zero-order correlations, and Table IV presents the metric and standardized coefficients for a regression analysis which examines the effects of father’s socio-economic status (when the respondent was age 16), parental education, and number of siblings on the educational, first job, and current occupational attainments of Canadian men and women. Statistics such as R‘, the

job is relate c f to the status of the current occupations, in part because certain

un r ikely.

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-.2

27

- .2

26

.229

.199

35.7

3

Mea

ns, M

dec

7.05

7.

36

4.69

34

.60

10.7

7 38

.83

44.8

4 -

(3.7

6)

(3.4

8)

(3.3

5)

(12.

84)

(3.7

4)

(14.

13)

(15.

08)

'Dat

a fo

r fe

mal

es gi

ven

abov

e th

e di

agon

al

bMea

sud

as B

hhen

-McR

ober

ts (

1976

) soc

ioec

onom

ic indices.

'Sta

ndar

d de

viat

ions

are

give

n n

pare

nthe

ses.


TABLE IV METRIC AND STANDARDIZED COEFFICENTS~ FOR STATUS AITAINMENT MODEL FOR NATIVE-BORN MALES AND FEMALES AGE 35-49, FULL-TIME PAID WORKERS, 1973 CANADIAN LABOUR FORCE

Dependent Variables and Sex

Education First lob Current job Independent Variables Males Females Males Females Males Females

Metric Coefficients Family of Origin Characteristics


Mother’s Education

Number of Siblings

Father’s Occupation

Respondent’s Education

Respondent’s First Job

Intercept

Standard Coefficients Family of Origin Characteristics

RZ(b)


Mother’s Education Number of Siblings Father’s Occupation

Respondent’s Education Respondent’s First Job

,158

,194 (. 023)

(.019) .056

(.005)

(.022)

-.204

-

-

7.253 ,265

,111 (. 032) ,210

(. 032) -.084 (. 029) .011

(. 008) -

-

8.858 ,189

,073 (. 073) .051

(.075) ,021

(. 063) ,179

(.017) 2.198 (.061) -

7.979 .452

,049 (.119) ,111

(.123) -.213 (.107) ,060

(. 029) 2.666 (. 133)

-

11.766 ,427

,014 (. 073)

(. 076) ,023

(.063) ,121

(.018)

1.325 (. 074) ,438

(.019) 9.514 ,514

- .046

-.125 (.114)

(.118)

(.103) ,038

(. 028) 1.269 (. 157) ,454

(. 034) 11.590

.467

- ,013

- ,143

.159 .153 ,019 ,015 ,003 -.039

.181 .264 .012 .031 -.011 -.004 -.183 -.097 .005 -.056 ,005 -.038

.191 ,050 ,163 ,064 .lo3 .041 - - .582 ,601 ,329 .287 - - - - ,410 ,456

‘Standard error for metric coefficients shown in parentheses bunadjusted R2

zero-order correlations and standardized coefficients should not be used to compare causal relationships across populations (Achon, 1977; Hanushek and Jackson, 1977: 20-22, 78; Kim and Mueller, 1976), and they are included here only for the sake of completeness and the benefit of those who may wish to use the results for purposes other than the cross-sex comparison. Unlike standardized coefficients, metric coefficients presented in Table IV can be directly compared for the male and female populations. These statistics indicate the change in the dependent variable which is produced by a unit change in a given independent variable, net of other independent variables. As a result, metric coefficients


TABLE V SEX DIFTERENCES IN MODELS OF EDUCATIONAL FIRST AND CURRENT OCCUPAnONAL ATTAINMENTS’

Sex Znteractions in Level of Difference Ratio Dependent Variables Independent Variables Significance ( M - F) MIF

Education Number of Siblings ,005 -.120 2.43 Father’s Occupation ,001 ,045 5.09

First Job Father’s Occupation ,001 ,119 2.98 Education ,005 -.468 .82

Current Job Father’s Occupation ,025 ,083 3.18

‘Models presented in Table IV

Intercept Term ,001 -1.605 .81

indicate the substantive impact (or ’effect’) which an independent variable has on the dependent variable. Whether or not the observed differences in metric coefficients between men and women are statistically significant have been assessed by statistical tests for interaction (Cohen, 1968; Gujarati, 1970) and the results are summarized in Table v.

We begin the analysis of sex differences in the occupational attainment process by examining the effect of social origin characteristics on male and female educational attainments. Throughout this examination, two related questions are asked. First, do sex differences exist with respect to the substantive impact or effect of social origins on educational attainment? Second, do ‘like-sex effects’ exist in which fathers influence the educational attainments of sons more than mothers, but where mothers, correspondingly, have a greater influence on the educational attainments of daughters?

With respect to the first question, comparisons of the metric coefficients (Table rv, columns I and 2) and statistical tests for interaction (Table v) indicate that father‘s occupational status, and number of siblings differentially affect the educational attainments of men and women. The effect of father’s occupational status on the subsequent educational attainment of the offspring is about five times higher for males than for females (b = .056 versus .oi l ) . In contrast, men appear to be more constrained in the educational system by a large family as indicated by the metric for number of siblings which is 2.4 times the size of the coefficient for females (Tables IV and v). Further, the difference in the intercepts for the regression equations for educational attainment is significant and to the advantage of women. Substantively, these sex differences in intercepts and in the effects of father’s occupational status and number of siblings translate into a net educational advantage over men for women from lower social origins and a disadvantage for women from higher social origins. This is shown by using the sex specific regression equations to calculate the educational attainments for men and women with sets of identical characteristics. Table VI presents the results of an exercise which examines the educational attainments of men and women from identical social origins, talung characteristics which approximate one and two standard deviations away from the means presented in Table III (McRoberts, 1979). These

14 M O N I C A BOYD

TABLE VI PREDICTED ATTAINMENTS OF LOW AND HIGH SOCIAL ORIGINS NATIVE-BORN MALES AND FEMALES, AGE 35-49, FULL-TIME PAID WORKERS 1973 CANADIAN LABOUR FORCE

~~ ~

Low Social High Social Origins" Originsb

Social Origin Characteristics Male Female Male Female

Father's Education 3 3 16 16 Mother's Education 4 4 15 15

Father's Occupation 22 22 61 61

Predicted Education' 8.1 9.6 16.1 14.5 Predicted First lobd 30.3 37.6 56.2 56.5 PredictedCurrentOccupation' 36.2 40.1 62.4 55.8

"These low soda1 origin characteristics approximate the values obtained at one standard deviation below the mean5 observed in Table 1x1. bThese high social origin characteristics approximate the values obtained at two standard deviations below the means observed in Table 1x1. 'Calculated from the social origin characteristics given in lines 1-4 of this table and from the regression equations in columns 1 and 2, Table IV. dCalculated from the predicted education given in line 5, the social characteristics given in lines 1-4, of this table and the regression equations in columns 3 and 4, Table IV. 'Calculated from the predicted education and first job statuses found in lines 5 and 6 of this table and the social origin characteristics given in lines 1-4 of this table and the regression equations in columns 5 and 6, Table IV.

Number of Siblings 8 8 0 0

computations reveal that women coming from a family with eight siblings and with low levels of paternal occupational status and parental education will obtain about one and a half more years of schooling than will men with comparable social origin characteristics. Conversely, women with no additional siblings, a paternal occupational status of 61 (which is the score assigned to sociologists and anthropologists), and highly educated parents will obtain over a year-and-a-half less schooling than men from identical social origins.

What support do the data give for the 'like-sex' phenomenon, in which a parent has more influence on the subsequent attainments of offspring of the same sex? According to this argument, the educational characteristics of fathers should have a greater effect than that of mothers on the educational attainment of sons, and the reverse should hold for the educational attainment of daughters. The data do not appear to support this argument. The metric coefficients for the model of educational attainment presented in Table IV and tests for interaction (Table v) reveal no differences between male and female educational attainments with respect to the effects exerted by father's education, or by mother's education. Using another technique described earlier by McClendon (1976: 59), the observed differences in the magnitude of paternal educational effects also are too small to be considered statistically different although they approach the .05 level of signifi-


cance for women. These results cast doubt upon the possibility that characteristics of mothers affect the educational attainments of daughters more than do paternal characteristics and vice versa for sons.

However, such a conclusion may be premature. Additional analysis not presented here indicates that the results shown in Table IV are affected by the listwise procedure which excludes non-respondents to the first job or current occupational status questions. When a model of educational attainment is produced for all full-time, paid, native-born members of the labour force, regard- less of whether or not they answered the first or current job questions, mother’s education has more of an impact (at the .05 level) on the education of daughters than does father’s education. But the education attainments of mothers and fathers continue to exert about the same magnitude of effects for the educational attainment of sons. Apparently mother’s education matters more than that of the father for the educational attainment of daughters but not so for the educational attainments of sons. This conclusion offers partial evidence of the like-sex effect argument. It is consistent with research by Marini (1980), Sewell, Hauser and Wolf (1980), and Treiman and Terrill ( ~ 9 7 5 ) ~ but it contradicts research by McClendon (1976) who found no evidence in support of like-sex parental effects on educational attainment.

So far the analysis indicates that the process of educational attainment differs by sex, and it offers partial support for the argument that the parent who is the same sex as the offspring has a greater effect on that offspring’s attainment than does the parent of the opposite sex. Do men and women also differ in the first and current job attainment processes? Does the like-sex pattern of effects exist with respect to the influence created by parental characteristics on occupational attainments ? These questions can be answered by continuing to assess the impact of social origin variables on subsequent occupational attainments of offspring. In addition, because educational and first-job attainments represent the first and second stages of socio-economic achievement, the impact of these variables on current occupational attainment are compared for men and women. The regression equations represented by the successive educational, first and current occupational attainments in Table IV provide two types of information. First, the data in Tables IV and v indicate whether the substantive impact of background variables and education on occupational attainments varies for men and women. Second, the system of structural equations presented in Table IV indicates whether or not the variables in question operate directly or indirectly by influencing some temporally prior attainment.

As was true for educational attainment of Canadian native-born men and women, the transition from school to first job is characterized by sex-specific differences in the attainment process. The payoff which women receive from their education on their first job is somewhat higher than that received by men. This finding is consistent with results of unpublished tabulations which show that women with completed elementary or high school education are more likely than men to enter a white-collar first job. But the higher occupational status returns which women receive from their education does not persist beyond the first job. Although education and first job status exert direct effects on the current occupational status of both men and women (Table IV, columns 5 and 6 ) , tests for

16 M O N I C A BOYD

interaction fail to detect any significant differences in the magnitude of these effects.

For both men and women, social origin variables generally affect first-job attainment only indirectly operating via their impact on educational attainment. However, as shown by the metric coefficients (Table IV, columns 3 and 4) and tests for interaction (Table v), a direct effect of father’s occupational status exists for the first-job attainments of men, and it is approximately three times larger than the negligible effect observed for women.3 This larger substantive impact of father’s occupations on the first-job attainments of men provides partial support for the argument that the attainments of offspring are influenced more by ’like-sex‘ parents than by the characteristics of opposite sex parents.

Father’s occupational status continues to have a significant effect on the current occupational status of sons but not of daughters. Whereas the father-son relationship continues well into the middle of the life cycle, the father-daughter effect virtually disappears (Table IV, columns 5 and 6 ) . At all stages of the socio-economic life cycle, then, males derive considerably greater advantage than females from the status achieved by their fathers. We can determine the total cumulative advantage which accrues to males in this way by estimating the reduced form coefficients (see Alwin and Hauser, 1975) for the respondents’ occupational status for the male and female respondents. The total effect of father’s occupational status on that of their son’s current occupation is three-and-a-half times larger than the comparable effect for daughters (.328 for males as compared to .og3 for females). Women from high social origins are the most disadvantaged by this male-female difference in the impact of father’s occupational status in the status attainment process. This is shown by data in Table VI, which traces the impact of social origin variables as they subsequently affect male and female educational and occupational attainments.4 As noted earlier, sex differences in the process of educational attainment generally benefit women from low social origins but handicap women from high status backgrounds. This benefit and disadvantage persist for first and current job attainments. Women from low social origins obtain first-job statuses which are about seven points higher than the statuses of men from similar origins, largely because their higher educational attainments and higher returns to education on first job wipe out the advantage which males derive from their father’s occupational status. In turn the higher first-job status of women, and their higher educational attainments, compensate for the insignificant direct effect of family origin variables on current job attainments, and as a result, the current occupational status of women from low social origins is about 4 points higher than the predicted current occupational status observed for their male counterparts (Table VI, columns I and 2 ) . The reverse scenario describes the attainments of women from high-status families. The lower effect of father’s occupational status on educational attainment (Table rv) in large part is responsible for the lower educational attainments of women from high social origins compared to men with similar origin characteristics (Table VI, columns 3 and 4). Women from high social origins obtain a first job which is similar to that predicted for their male counterparts (56.5 versus 56.2). But the lower educational attainment, and the insignificant direct effect of father’s occupational status all cumulate over the occupational life cycle for women from high social origin families, with the result

17 SEX D I F F E R E N C E S I N O C C U P A T I O N A L A T T A I N M E N T P R O C E S S

that these women have current occupational statuses which are eight points lower than the status predicted for men coming from identical social origins (Table VI, columns 3 and 4).

The data in Table VI and other similar unpublished calculations show that women from high social origins are the most disadvantaged by the cumulative effect of sex differences in the status attainment process. The fact that the male-female gap in occupational status is conditioned by the high or low social origins is consistent with the greater concentration of women compared to men in the middle ranges of the occupational status distribution (Table 11). Father’s occupational status has a lower, and indirect effect on the occupational achievements of women. Instead, education becomes the basis for female first and current job attainments. Women from lower social origins who enter the labour force full time benefit relative to males from this model of attainment, but women from high social origins are disadvantaged, primarily because the direct benefit which accrues to males from paternal occupational status becomes very large for offspring of high status families. As a result, women are not found in the lowest status occupations to the same degree as men, but neither are they in the highest status occupations. This finding, of course, is contingent upon the scaling properties of the Blishen-McRoberts index, and it does not deny the existence of other dimensions of inequality, as when women are paid less than men or experience greater job insecurity.

MALE-FEMALE D I F F E R E N C E S I N T H E O C C U P A T I O N A L A T T A I N M E N T P R O C E S S : A N E L A B O R A T I O N

The model of occupational attainment which was explored in the previous section is one which has been commonly used in previous investigations into the status attainments of North American men and women (Cuneo and Curtis, 1975; McClendon, 1976; Treas and Tyree, 1979; Treiman and Terrill, 1975; Wang, 1973). However, the selection of variables in this model derives not only from the theoretical framework employed (Blau and Duncan, 1967; Horan, 1978) but also from the application of this framework to studies of the male labour force. As a result, this model makes no attempt to explicitly incorporate those factors which may affect the specific work-related experiences of women. This section extends the basic model to consider three additional factors which may differentially influence the occupational attainments of men and women - maternal labour force experience, time in the labour force, and marital status.5

Interest in the effects of mother’s work experience on the attainments of their children arises from the like-sex-effect question discussed earlier in the paper. According to this view, mothers are expected to be more influential than fathers in the attainments of daughters, and fathers are similarly expected to be more influential than mothers with respect to the attainments of sons (Marini, 1980; McClendon, 1976; Sewell, Hauser, and Wolf, 1980; Treiman and Terrill, 1975). The analysis in the previous section presented two pieces of evidence which are consistent with this position. First, the analysis of the educational attainment process showed that the effect of mother’s education on the educational attainments of daughters was greater in magnitude than the effect of the father’s

18 M O N I C A BOYD

education. Second, the effect of father’s occupational status on educational, first-job, and current occupational achievements is much lower for daughters than for sons. However, strong support for the like-sex-effect argument as it concerns occupational attainment requires an additional finding, namely that the effects of maternal occupational status on the occupational status of the respondent is stronger for daughters than for sons. Unfortunately, this piece of evidence is unavailable since detailed occupations of mothers were not asked in the Canadian Mobility Study. In its place a measure of whether or not the mother worked full time during the respondent’s elementary or secondary school years is used. This is an imperfect but not unreasonable proxy for several reasons. First, it captures the role-modelling effects on the females’ job performance which might be expected from the role model for the simultaneous tasks of wife, mother, and worker. Second, it captures part of the additional financial resources which the mother’s work brought to the family and which were available for supporting the childrens’ career aspirations (see Marini, 1980; Rosenfeld, 1978; Stevens and Boyd, 1980). The results presented in Table VI give modest but statistically significant support to the like-sex argument with respect to occupational attainment. Women on average receive an increment of 2 . 0 points as a result of having had a working mother while males receive a slightly lower 1.5 point increment, a difference which is statistically significant at the .05 level. Elsewhere, log-linear analysis of the mother- daughter distributions across five occupational categories has been presented to provide further support for the like-sex-effect argument (Stevens and Boyd, 1980).

The second addition to the basic model is the inclusion of respondents’ labour force experience (number of years worked in which the respondent worked seven months or more). As might be expected in light of the association between marriage, motherhood, and labour force exits, women aged 35-49 on the average have spent fewer years in the labour force than men. Such differences in the characteristics of men and women will in themselves affect their occupational attainments. But there are several reasons for suspecting that women will suffer an additional disadvantage as a result of not receiving the same returns to experience as men. First, years in the labour force may be considered a proxy for on-the-job training (Mincer, 1974) but studies on labour market segmentation indicate that women typically are hired for those jobs in which the employer provides minimal on-the-job training (Wolf and Rosenfeld, 1978). Second, the fact that women are found in occupations with low-career trajectories means that additional years in the labour force may add very little to occupational advancement. Finally, the discontinuity of female accumulation of job experience may reduce its value, especially in internal labour markets. The results presented in Table VII for all men and women in the full-time, paid labour force do not support these expectations. The increments in occupational status which men and women receive from their labour-force experience are not significantly different. While women pay a price for working fewer years, they receive approximately the same return from the experience gained in years in which they have worked. Two caveats to these findings are in order, however. First, as Wolf and Rosenfeld (1978) have shown, cross-sectional data will tend to be insensitive to differences in returns to labour-force experience. The second caveat is an empirical one which arises from the consideration of the effects of marital status.

TABL

E M

M

EA

NS

AN

D S

TA

ND

AR

D D

EV

IAT

ION

S A

ND

RE

GR

ESS

ION

C

OE

FFIC

IEN

TS FO

R A

MO

DE

L O

F O

CC

UPA

TIO

NA

L A

TT

AIN

ME

NT

FO

R

NA

TIV

E-B

OR

N

MA

LE

S A

ND

FE

MA

LE

S,

35-4

9, N

LL

-TIM

E P

AID

WOR

KERS

, 19

73 CA

NA

DIA

N L

AB

OU

R F

OR

CE

Met

ric

Coef

ficie

nts’

M

eans

and

Sta

ndar

d D

evia

tionb

Fem

ales

Fe

mal

es

All

6 Al

l A1

1 Al

l M

ales

Fe

mal

es

Sing

le

Mar

ried

O

ther

M

ales

Fe

mal

es

Sing

le

Mar

ried

O

ther

Fath

er’s

Educ

atio

n

Mot

her’

s Edu

catio

n

Num

ber

of Si

blin

gs

Fath

er’s

Occ

upat

ion

Res

pond

ent’s

Edu

catio

n

Firs

t Job

Mot

her

Wor

ked

Num

ber

of Y

ears

Wor

ked

Occ

upat

iona

l Sta

tus o

f Cur

rent

Job

Inte

rcep

t R

2 N, w

eigh

ted

.014

-.1

35

(.075

) (1

.116

)

(.077

) (.1

21)

(. 066

) (.

106)

.l

o8

.047

(.

OM)

(.028

) 1.

382

1.18

5 (.0

76)

(.163

) .4

45

.476

(.0

19)

(.035

) 1.

450

1.95

9 (.5

92)

(.856

) ,1

22

,114

(.0

33)

(.043

)

-.059

-.011

,061

-.1

20

6.16

5 9.

094

,516

,4

82

-.536

-.0

86

(.285

) (.140)

(.330

) (.1

42)

(.267

) (.1

26)

,086

.0

27

(.078

) (.0

34)

,595

1.

245

(.485

) (.2

03)

,638

,4

57

(.103

) (.0

42)

,780

3.

111

(2.4

38)

(1.0

04)

(.132

) (.0

54)

.544

-.0

38

-.547

,0

39

-.052

,2

07

10.2

58

7.83

9

,647

,4

52

,173

(.2

96)

-.369

- ,5

75

(.291

) .0

37

(. 06

9)

.989

(.3

61)

,507

(.

092)

-3

.803

(2

.243

)

(.335

)

-.046

(.

111)

- 16

.029

,583

-

7.11

(3

.77)

7.

42

(3.4

8)

4.66

34.8

1 (1

2.92

) 10

.85

(3.7

6)

39.2

0 (1

4.20

) .1

4

22.1

2 (6

.63)

45

.21

(15.

06)

(3.3

4)

(.35)

- - 2739

7.40

(3

.91)

7.

95

4.50

(3

.29)

35

.89

(13.

45)

11.3

8 (2

.80)

44

.68

(12.

54)

.19

(3.5

3)

(.a)

14.7

3 (7

.70)

45

.98

(12.

56)

- - 758

7.04

7.70

(3

.93)

(3.5

3)

(3.3

9)

4.84

36.0

7 (1

3.03

) 12

.19

(3.2

0)

47.5

0 (1

3.53

) .1

7

19.7

3 (6

.98)

47

.82

(13.

83)

(.37)

- - 99

7.27

(3

.80)

7.

84

4.56

(3

.31)

35

.24

(13.

00)

11.2

6 (2

.58)

44

.04

(12.

24)

.20

(.@I

13.4

6 (7

.33)

45

.59

(12.

31)

(3.4

9)

- - 555

8.46

8.73

(3

.66)

3.

85

39.2

3 (1

5.66

) 11

.30

45.4

2 (1

2.84

)

.18

16.8

1

46.2

5 (1

2.62

)

(4.3

3)

(3.0

4)

(3.3

7)

(.39)

(7.9

3)

- - 104

‘Sta

ndar

d er

ror

is sh

own

in p

wen

thes

es

bSta

ndar

d de

viat

ion

is sh

own

in u

aren

thes

es

20 M O N I C A BOYD

Among the significant sex-specific factors which the analysis has ignored is the role of marital status. So far the experiences of married women are not differentiated from those of single 'career' women who do not take on the traditional female roles of wife and mother. Given the multiplicity of social roles assumed by married women, and the possible family-career tradeoffs which may occur, socio-economic attainment processes might be expected to differ for married and nonmarried women (see Boyd, 1977; Hudis, 1976; Spitze and Waite, 1980; Waite, 1975; Wolf, 1976). Table VII presents the results for married, single (never-married), and widowed and divorced women. The most noteworthy result from this analysis is that the occupational attainment process for single women is least like the male process. This finding is surprising in view of the perceptions that as 'career' women, single women should be more like men in their work histories. As in the United States (Sewell, Hauser, and Wolf, 1980) the current occupational attainments of Canadian single women appear to be entirely a step-by-step process whereby the causal effects of education are mediated entirely by first job and where first job is the only significant variable affecting current occupational status. For the widowed and divorced, only education and first job have direct effects on current occupational status. Unlike males and married females, there is no effect on labour-force experience or having had a working mother.

These findings are intriguing and certainly not self-explanatory. As a prelude to a more detailed analysis of this question, however, one point is worth noting. It is important to recall the selective character of the female sample in the full-time paid labour force. The selectivity is even more characteristic of married women. Only 23 per cent of married women are in the full-time paid labour force compared to 69 per cent of single women and 53 per cent of the divorced and widowed women. Married women tend to be more homogeneous with respect to educational and occupational experiences and come from higher social origins than married women not in the full-time labour force. They also are more likely to have mothers who worked. It would appear that those married women who are in the full-time labour force are there precisely because their work and career experiences are most like those of men and suffer least from female-related career contingencies. Their experiences may be very atypical compared to married women working part time or compared to other women who have exited from the labour force (see Marini, 1980). Certainly our analysis shows single, divorced, and widowed women to be less favoured in the attainment process, a finding which is consistent with their lower career mobility (Table VII, columns 8-10).

C O N C L U S I O N S

Although the socio economic statuses of current occupations on the average are very similar for native-born men and women in the Canadian labour force, sex differences exist in the process by which such occupational statuses are attained. For men, number of siblings presents more of a disadvantage in the educational attainment process than it does for women. But father's occupational status has a stronger positive effect on educational attainments of men, and the influence of father's occupational status persists throughout the life cycle, directly affecting first and current occupational attainments. The educational attainments of women

21 S E X D I F F E R E N C E S I N O C C U P A T I O N A L A T T A I N M E N T PROCESS

are less influenced by social origins, as are their occupational attainments. In particular for those women who are single, widowed or divorced, current occupational status is achieved wholly on the basis of education and/or first-job characteristics.

These conclusions invite further scrutiny of the roles played by social origins and education in the status attainment process. Why do social origins differentially influence the educational attainment process of Canadian men and women, and why does father’s occupational status in particular continue to affect the occupational attainments of sons but not daughters into the mid-life? Why does education have a greater influence on the first-job attainments of women than on the attainments of men? What might account for the findings of similar educational effects on the current occupational attainments of men and women? And what might explain the different attainment processes observed for married, single, widowed, and divorced women in the labour force? Answering these questions in full requires a different research design, methodology, and data than that used in the Canadian Mobility Study. But in addressing these questions, we suggest that our findings are consistent with, and at least partly explained by, the sex labelling and sex segregation of occupations in the Canadian labour force.

The potential relationship between sex labelling and sex segregation of occupations and our findings is evident with respect to sex differences in the educational process. As shown in Tables IV and v, the educational attainment of males is influenced to a greater extent by father’s occupational status and number of siblings than is female educational attainment. As a result the educational attainments of women relative to men is elevated for low social-origin respondents and depressed for high social-origin respondents (Table VI). This finding is consistent with previous studies on completed schooling distributions of men and women in Canada. Women are more likely than males to complete high school and to obtain some post-secondary schooling, but they are less likely than males to obtain a university education (Robb and Spencer, 1976). The results from the Canadian Mobility Study emphasize the role of social origins in producing this outcome. The specific mechanisms through which social origins affect subsequent educational attainments cannot be examined with the data at hand but other research shows social origins to produce different educational outcomes for men and women by virtue of affecting aspirations, parental, teacher, and peer influence, and tracking (see Gilbert and McRoberts, 1977; Porter and Blishen, 1973; Sewell and Hauser, 1975; and Sewell and Shah, 1967). We suggest these outcomes also are related to the sex labelling of occupations and to the location of sex-segregated occupational training programs. Women from low social origins may be advantaged in the educational process compared to men of similar origin because they are encouraged or permitted to stay in school in light of specific job-related training programs within schools. In particular, typical female clerical jobs may be perceived as requiring high school or post-secondary education, both because of general certification requirements and because clerical and secretarial training is offered as part of the school curriculum. However, for male blue-collar jobs, getting into the labour force and receiving on-the-job training may be more important than continuing in the formal educational system (see Gaskell, 1981). For respondents in our study, training for the higher status female-labelled

22 M O N I C A BOYD

occupations (e. g. teaching and nursing) occurred in post-secondary but not university settings and this also may explain the finding that women from higher social origins are disadvantaged relative to males in the educational attainment process. Since our results pertain to women and men age 35-49 in 1973, further research on the educational attainments of young men and women in the seventies and eighties will be of interest to students of stratification.

Although the average levels of occupational attainment achieved by men and women do not greatly differ, the process by which they arrive at their current position in the occupational status hierarchy does differ. The characterization of industrial societies as ’achievement oriented’ appears to bear more directly on the experience of women than men. After completing their education women derive relatively little advantage from the status of their family of origin, at least as measured by father’s occupation. Women tend to cluster in the middle levels of the occupational hierarchy (Table 111) and they arrive there in large measure on the basis of educational credentials. Such relative freedom from social origins and the reliance on education offers at best a mixed blessing. Although women are less likely than men to get the lowest status jobs, they also are less likely to get into the upper levels of the occupational hierarchy. The principal losers in this process are women from higher status families who do not reap the benefits of their father’s status to the same degree as their brothers.

These findings are consistent with other observations concerning male-female differences in the labour force. The higher effect of education attainment on the first-job status of women may reflect the tendency of women to receive job-specific skills in school compared to men who are more likely to experience training on the job (Gaskell, 1981). Because of this, women are likely to receive a higher return for education when they initially enter the labour market. But this ’in-school’ training also characterizes such traditional female occupations as secretarial work, nursing, and teaching. These same occupations, however, have limited career trajectories. As a result it is not surprising to find that the higher effect of education does not last for women beyond the first job.

Explaining why the occupational status of the father has a greater effect on the attainments of sons than on the attainments of daughters is a relatively unexplored area of status attainment research. Substantively, the finding implies that fathers influence the careers of sons more than those of daughters, but left unspecified are the mechanisms by which such influence is transmitted. Clearly occupational inheritance can occur either because the father serves as role model and/or because occupationally specific resources can be directly passed on. Examples of such inheritance are when a son inherits the family farm or when a son is given preference by law school admission boards as a result of the father’s position in the profession. Other mechanisms may be less obvious, for example, when fathers impart their knowledge and perceptions of the opportunity structure or when they actively participate in the son‘s job search by contacting their fellow workers and their own employers. All of these mechanisms will be curtailed for women to the extent that the occupational structure is sex segregated. Specific occupational inheritance becomes more difficult for daughters when the occupation to be inherited is firmly entrenched in an all male world (e.g. construction contractor, house painter, mechanical engineer) and may well be impossible if sons are dvailable for recruitment. Assistance in the form of pinpointing likely sources of

23 SEX DIFFERENCES I N O C C U P A T I O N A L A T T A I N M E N T PROCESS

employment or involving offspring in a job-related social network also is less likely since fathers will tend to know little about the features of female types of occupations and because daughters are not considered to be legitimate participants in male occupations.

The finding that the occupational status of the father continues to influence the successive education and first and current attainments of sons is consistent with a like-sex-effect model of attainment, in which parents influence the educational and occupational attainments of like-sex offspring more than the attainments of opposite-sex offspring. Additional support for such a like-sex effect model is offered from the female models of educational and occupational attainment. Consideration of an extended model of occupational attainment indicates that the occupational status of women is influenced more by having a mother in the full-time labour force than is true for men. What cannot be determined from this analysis is why mother’s work status should have a larger effect on female occupational attainments than on males. Workmg mothers may serve as role models with respect to career orientation or to handling the tripartite demands of wife, mother, and labour-force worker, an interpretation which is strengthened by the propensity of a woman’s occupation to replicate that of her mother’s (Stevens and Boyd, 1980). Clearly, more in-depth analyses of the influences of parental work characteristics on the subsequent careers of their offspring is necessary to fully address these issues.

Further specification of the model of occupational attainment indicates that a mother’s work status only influences the attainments of married women. The occupational attainments of single, widowed or divorced women are not affected by maternal labour-force participation. Neither are their attainments affected by years in the labour force, which operates to enhance the status of men and married women. Marital status appears to internally stratify the female population with respect to the process of occupational attainment, but largely because the married women who are in the full-time paid labour force are not typical of all married women. Single, widowed, and divorced women are not ’typical’ either, but their occupational attainment experience may capture better the sex-segregated nature of the labour force. To the extent that women are allocated into occupations with poorly developed career trajectories and little on-the-job training, their occupational achievements will depend on the initial job held, and on the pre-job training received in school. Their current attainment will tend to bear little relation to the length of time spent in an occupation or in the labour force. If the occupational attainment process of married women is indeed atypical when compared to that of other married and single women then, other things being equal, future investigations which study a labour force with a much higher female participation rate should produce findings which heighten rather than attenuate these sexual inequalities in the occupational attainment process.

N O T E S

I Two reviewers have expressed concern that the exclusion of cases due to listwise regression leads to an analysis of a selective population, and they suggest the use of pairwise regression procedures to minimize such selectivity. There is no question that the analysis is selective of better educated and higher socio-economic status individ-

24 M O N I C A BOYD

uals since nonrespondents tend to be less educated and from lower socio-economic origins and status. Much of this selectivity is not due to listwise regression procedures but to the initial nonresponse rates to current occupation of 12.7 and 18.4 per cent for full-time paid males and females respectively. Such selectivity would also affect pairwise regression. Further, as discussed in Cohen and Cohen (1975: 268-91) and Kim and Curry (i977), pairwise regression should be used if and only if the data are randomly missing. If they are not, the results of a pairwise regression must be treated with considerable skepticism. For the population which did report occupation a comparison of listwise and pairwise derived means, tests for random patterns of non-response, and the use of indicator variables (Cohen and Cohen, 1975: 268-71; Kim and Curry, 1977) all indicated existence of response selectivity for higher socio- economic individuals. For this reason as well as the need to perform tests for sex interactions (see Treiman and Terrill, 1975: 185), listwise regression is used, with the obvious limitation that the results refer to the native-born full-time paid labour force who answered the questions on the variables analyzed.

z These high rates of nonresponse persist when adjustments are made for the fact that respondents who had never held a full-time first job were instructed by the Canadian Mobility questionnaire design not to give current occupation. Of the native and foreign-born women who did give first-job information, 32 per cent of the part-time workers and 59 per cent of the unpaid family workers did not give their current occupation.

3 The regression of first job on father’s occupation shows that the metric coefficient for women is 0.060 with a standard error of 0.029 (Table 111). However, the weighting procedure used slightly overestimates the actual number of women in this analysis making the standard errors slightly smaller than they should be, given the actual sample size for women. There is room for the interpretation that father’s occupational status has no direct effect on first-job status of the daughter, and operates indirectly via its effect on female educational attainments.

4 As the notes to Table VI indicate, the predicted educational and occupational outcomes are calculated from the regression equations provided in Table iv. This was chosen for the simplicity and consistency offered to the reader. Two alternative procedures were followed but results are not presented. First, in calculating the predicted educational or occupational attainments, the increment attributable to each independent variable can be produced. This forms the basis for the comments in the text concerning the obliteration or retention of the effects of father‘s occupational status in the attainment process. Second, a more parsimonious model of attainment can be used by constraining the effects of variables to be identical for men and women in those instances where tests for interaction do not reveal a significant difference. Generally, although the absolute magnitude of predicted education and occupational status changed slightly, the use of this regression equation are consistent with the conclusions derived from data presented in Table VI.

model. First, does the respecification substantially alter the conclusions reached on the basis of the initial models discussed earlier (e.g. do differences noted previously disappear), and second, what new information does the inclusion of these additional variables bring to the problem at hand. The results presented in Table w in no way alter the conclusions from the previous section and hence we shall restrict attention to the new variables added to the model.

5 Two different sets of issues raise the inclusion of additional variables in the basic


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