The Gender Division of Labor and Family Change in Industrial Societies: A Theoretical Accounting

This paper explores the reasons for the plethora of well-known changes that characterize the family as a social institution in the closing decades of the twentieth century, changes sometimes labelled "a second demographic transition" (Lesthaeghe, 1992) . Our purpose is to develop a theoretical explanation of the processes that link economic expansion in the decades since the end of World War II to a number of family changes shared by industrial nations: to explain how macrostructural change affects individual decision making and the gender division of labor, resulting, at the aggregate level, in cross-nationally similar changes in the structure and functioning of the family as a social institution. We will not be concerned with explaining differences among nations on any variables. Our central thesis is as follows. Since the post-World War II recovery, industrial nations have undergone profound transformations in their economies that have had the net impact of significantly expanding the demand for women's participation in the formal labor force, specifically in service occupations. The timing and extent of this transformation have been variable cross-nationally, but nearly all nations that were industrialized prior to that war had begun to experience it by the early 1970s. In turn, the array of family changes observed in recent decades is a function of social psychological processes resulting from a major shift in the gender division of labor by which women have come increasingly to resemble men in their rates of labor force participation, within a context where men have not come to resemble women in their domestic/familial work. In the first section of this paper we present change data for 21 industrial nations for the decades 1960 to 1990 for variables concerning the labor force, post-secondary education and four family-related phenomena. These data will be used to demonstrate the fact that, regardless of cross-national variation in the extent and timing of change, there is overwhelming uniformity in the direction of change. In the second, longer section we develop a process model that attempts to explain these uniformities among industrial nations. I. Documenting Change: 1960-1990 In this section, after describing the sample, we first examine percentage change in the sizes of four labor forces: total, total service in(ustry, [emale ana female service industry. We next present data on change in post-secondary school enrollment rates of women. Finally, change rates in the following family-related variables are presented: total fertility, first marriage and first birth rates for three age cohorts, and divorce rates. The Sample Our sample consists of 21 industrial nations. They comprise all those listed in the World Development Report as "Industrial Market Economies," plus the highest three of those listed as "Middle Income," for 1960 (World Bank, 1981: Tables 5, 6 and 7). National rankings were based on three measures: GNP/capita, GDP/capita and per capita energy consumption. In our tables, nations are listed in the rank order provided by this report. We chose the 1960 rank order because, wherever available, that year constitutes our base year for examining changes in labor force, education and family variables. It is likely that, with the exception of some nations that did not have market economies after World War II, virtually all nations that were substantially industrialized prior to that war are included in the sample. We have omitted all non-market economy nations because the available data are less reliable and because our later discussion presupposes a level of individual freedom not generally available in those nations during the decades in question Labor Market Expansion and The Demand for Women's Labor Later in this paper we will argue that the impetus for family change originated in the expanding demand for women's labor that arises in industrial nations from economic expansion generally and from expansion of service occupations specifically. …