Female Participation in the Occupational System: A Comparative Institutional Analysis

This paper uses cross-national data to examine how economic, political, and educational structures affect both the participation of women in the labor force and their employment in more powerful and wellrewarded positions. We find that both the level of industrialization and the degree of state corporateness positively influence the participation of women, but that these fail to affect the proportion of women in the administrative and managerial occupations. However, the relative number of women in higher education shows positive effects on both dependent variables. We interpret this finding as a process of ‘institutional demystification’ and discuss the overall pattern of effects as ‘incorporation at the rear of the bus.’