Unlimited unskilled labour and the sex segregation of occupations in Jamaica

Abstract

In the developing world, standard measures of occupational segregation by sex may be deeply misleading because of structural, cultural and historical differences between developing countries and the developed countries that often feature in studies of segregation. In Jamaica in particular, the legacy of slavery has made female labour an integral part of the workforce for centuries - whereas large-scale female participation in the developed countries can only be measured in decades. The authors find that the country's large, undifferentiated pools of unskilled labour ironically translate into lower levels of occupational segregation, with women outpacing men in the professional categories.