SHARMINI PERIES: It's The Real News Network.
I'm Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore.
In the last three decades, the share of women
in the workforce has increased throughout
the world.
Don't get your champagne glasses out yet.
We're going to take a closer look at this
change by discussing a working paper at the
Political Economy Research Institute, PERI,
titled "The Cost of Exclusion: Gender Job
Segregation, Structural Change and the Labor
Share of Income."
The authors, Stephanie Seguino and Alyssa
Bronstein show how the segregation of women
within the industrial sector weakens the overall
bargaining of industrial workers.
On to talk about this with me is Stephanie
Seguino.
She is a professor of economics at the University
of Vermont and a research scholar at PERI
Institute at University of Massachusetts,
Amherst.
She's also a professorial research associate
at the Department of Development Studies School
of Oriental and African Studies, SOAS, at
the University of London.
Stephanie, good to have you with us.
S. SEGUINO: Thank you for having me.
SHARMINI PERIES: Stephanie let's start at
the beginning.
What is it you set out to do in this study,
and give us some broad strokes in terms of
what you found?
S. SEGUINO: We, in this study, wanted to unravel
a puzzle.
The puzzle we wanted to unravel was that the
data show that over the last, since 1991,
that there has, women's employment rates relative
to men's employment rates have been rising,
right?
So women's share of employment has been increasing
over this period of time.
But, at the same time, women's share of good
jobs, that is jobs in the industrial sector,
has decreased.
It's puzzling for a number of reasons, not
the least of which is that educational gaps
between men and women have narrowed substantially.
So it can't be related to skill.
It must be other phenomena that are going
on, and we really wanted to unravel and untangle
that piece of it, especially because it highlights
that the trends we are seeing are gender conflictive,
right?
That women are doing better in terms of access
to jobs but there is a decreasing share of
jobs that are good jobs and women are being
squeezed out of those jobs.
SHARMINI PERIES: What were the main reasons
that women were excluded from the industrial
sector jobs?
S. SEGUINO: Sure.
One of them was structural change.
There is a process of what we call premature
de-industrialization, and so we've seen a
decline in industrial employment as a percentage
of all employment globally as well as industrial
value added as a percentage of GDP.
That means that there's a smaller number of
good jobs and I think that scarcity triggers
men and employers to exclude women because
of this notion of stratification, that men
have more right to good jobs when those jobs
are scarce.
That was a critical factor.
Another factor was the rising capital-to-labor
ratio, meaning more capital-intensive production.
There's no reason that that should lead to
women being excluded on its face because again,
educational gaps have closed, or narrowed
substantially, but I think there are, there
are complex factors in that.
It could be that there is a perception on
the part of employers that women are more
likely to leave, to have children and so forth
and they want workers that are going to be
continuous because they're investing in their
training.
It could be the gender hierarchies, that these
are higher quality jobs.
Those were two really critical factors, that
structural change in the economy, measured
by capital intensity and the growth of industrial
sector jobs as a percentage of all jobs.
There were some other factors that were really
interesting.
Weighted tariffs had a positive effect on
women's access to industrial sector jobs,
and I think that's because especially in developing
countries, by being able to impose import
tariffs, it preserved industrial sector jobs
in these countries.
We found government spending has a positive
effect on women's share of industrial sector
jobs also.
SHARMINI PERIES: So then, how does the increased
use of capital in industry, the so-called
capital-intensive production, affect the allocation
of jobs and income between women and men in
countries where the industry is still based
on labor-intensive production?
S. SEGUINO: So here's the deal.
We wanted to analyze in particular the issues
around structural change, whether it's technology
or rules around globalization, such as trade
and tariffs and FDI and so forth, as well
as I said, the overall structural change of
the economy in terms of the types of goods
that are produced.
So we controlled for labor supply factors,
women and men's labor force education, participation
rates, gender differences in education and
once we did that, here's what we found, was
that when the percentage of jobs that are
in the industrial sector rise, women's share
of the industrial sector jobs increases.
Why is that important?
Well basically, what's been happening is the
opposite, that industrial sector jobs are
declining in most countries and this is something
that Danny Rodrick and others have called
premature de-industrialization.
There's increasing scarcity of good jobs,
and we kind of rely on a stratification theoretical
framework and a dual labor market framework
to argue that, that relationship, that is
when the number of good jobs is declining,
norms of stratification in which women are
lower in the hierarchy are more likely to
get excluded from those jobs.
That is, men are likely to preserve the fewer
good jobs that exist for themselves.
That's what the data are consistent with.
The data are also consistent with the fact
that as the capital intensity of production
increases, women also are more likely to be
excluded from those jobs, not because they
don't have the skills, but I think because
probably of gender norms as well as gender
hierarchies, and that gender hierarchy answers
this question.
When good jobs are scarce, who is more deserving
of that job?
It is typically people that are higher up
in the hierarchy and in this case, males.
SHARMINI PERIES: Right.
In terms of wages, you argue that women's
participation in the industrial sector lowers
the overall wage of the workers in that sector.
How does that actually take place?
S. SEGUINO: I think it's through a bargaining
power process, right?
When you do an aggregate analysis that Alyssa
and I did, you can't really get down to the
micro level, and you need a micro-level data
set to help you figure that out.
But I think what's going on is a bargain process
that men are less able to bargain for higher
wages because their fallback position is weaker,
in the sense that there are fewer good jobs
and that women are segregated into the low
quality jobs and that gender nature of those
jobs really for a variety of reasons depresses
wages there.
Men recognize that there's a huge cost to
losing their job in the industrial sector.
It therefore weakens them in terms of their
willingness to bargain aggressively for higher
wages.
SHARMINI PERIES: Stephanie, you have chosen
to use an econometric model for your paper
to show the correlation between various factors.
Now, often, particularly when you do gender
related research, you put in a lot of qualitative
analysis into it, but you choose an econometric
model and usually this is associated with
mainstream neo-classical economics as they
reduce complex social and political realities
into numerical relations.
Why did you choose this as the model?
S. SEGUINO: Most of my work has relied on
quantitative analysis.
I think it's important to move from anecdote
to these kinds of analyses that will tell
us about patterns in the data.
But you can't really build these models without
this kind of, this qualitative micro-level
analysis.
A lot of what Alyssa and I were theorizing
around dual labor markets has been micro-level
analysis and qualitative analysis.
That informs the way that we construct these
models.
I think that these quantitative models are
important because they do tell you about patterns
in the data.
They're one piece of a variety of pieces of
evidence that you need to make your case.
I often think about this in the way that I
think about legal cases in court.
There's very rarely a single piece of evidence
that a lawyer relies on to convince the jury.
Usually it's a variety of pieces of data,
and so this kind of econometric analysis is
one piece of data.
It happens to be consistent with the qualitative
studies that we're hearing around job, the
quality of jobs in developing countries in
the process of globalization and it's consistent
with stratification theory.
I think that it's, as I said, it's one piece
of a larger array of pieces of evidence.
The question is does this piece of evidence
line up with the conclusions of the other
methodological approaches?
Then if it does, you have a very strong case.
SHARMINI PERIES: Stephanie, in what way will
these findings be incorporated into policy?
S. SEGUINO: That is a good question.
We did this, Alyssa and I did this work and
it is chapter 5 in the new UNCTAD Flagship
Report, the Trade and Investment Report for
2017, and I think in that context because
it will be widely distributed amongst UN organizations
and hopefully widely read, that that will
begin some discussions around policies that
could be used to address the issues raised
in the paper.
SHARMINI PERIES: All right Stephanie.
I thank you so much for joining us and all
the best with your paper.
S. SEGUINO: Thanks so much.
Thank you.
SHARMINI PERIES: And thank you for joining
us on The Real News Network.
