Working on a Rainy Day (Don)

Barbara and I spent a rainy day working in the solarium. I finished a draft of a paper Dustin Avent-Holt and I are working on. Here is the paper abstract:

Workplace Relations and Gender Earnings Inequality

We develop a model of workplace gender inequality integrating the strong theoretical tradition in gender scholarship that sees gender as a process enacted locally with emerging models in the stratification literature that describe inequality as the outcome of relational power struggles between actors. Our model predicts that when gender inequality is contested there will be as many gender gaps in earnings as there are workplaces and that these locally produced gender inequality regimes can be explained in terms of the intersection of gender with other claims- making resources and institutional context. We examine these ideas with US and Japanese data on individuals nested within manufacturing workplaces in the early 1980s. In both countries the evidence supports the general prediction of workplace gender wage gap variation. In the US, where gender distinctions were more politically contested, gender linked claims making resources are powerful in explaining that variation. In Japan, where gender distinctions were less locally contested, access to life time employment is found to be a functional alternative to earnings as a basis for instituting gender inequality. In both countries the exclusion of women from high wage firms produces between firm gender earnings inequality.