The sexual division of labour and women's heterogeneity.

Abstract

The cornments by Bruegel and by Ginn et al. (hereafter the Eleven) on my article4Five feminist myths about female employment' (Hakim 1995b) do not constitute a step forward in research and debate on female employment. Bruegel agrees with me on all main issues; herdisagreements are on points of detail rather than fundamental substance and are presented too briefly to be clear. The Eleven provide a catalogue of selective evidence of the kind that characterizes advocacy research rather than detached and dispassionate social science. What they say is generally arguable. The problem is that they do not give the comptete story and the parts they leave out change our conclusions fundamentally. To take just one example, the Eleven quote a paper by Rubery et al. showing that women part-timers are 'overqualified' for theirjobs, but fail to mention that the paper also shows full-timers to be similarly 'overqualified' for theirjobs. The paper also shows that it is full-time workers, men and women, who most often wish to change their employer if they could, not part-timers. This is hardly consistent with the notion that employers exploit part-timers in particular. They also fail to note that in the same paper part-timers report theirjobs to bejust as secure and permanent as full-timejobs so this can hardly be the cause of higher turnover among part-timers (Rubery et al. 1994: 214, 225, 227). There is agreatdeal of valuable research evidence in this source and other recent publications that the Eleven similarly ignore. On balance, the research evidence shows that part-time work does not change a woman's primary self-identity as a housewife, does not change her bargaining power and weight in decision-making and does not change her role in the household. From a sociological perspective, part-timers can be grouped with housewives rather than with wage workers in aggregate data. We cannot expect the expansion of part-time work to be the catalyst for social and economic change, and this is the key point about the myth of rising female employment, which the Eleven do not even address. It will not do for social scientists to be economical with the truth, giving one half of the story but failing to mention the inconvenient evidence. Social scientists are supposed to take account of all the evidence rather than relying on sample selection bias and selective perception to support