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distributed differendy between full-time and part-time employment or in different fields or levels of education or in other ways that affect people's economic prospects. In short, even an absence of discrimination would not mean an absence of male-female economic differences.

Occupational Differences

Even when women and men earn the same incomes in the same occupations, differences in the distribution of the sexes among different occupations lead to differences in their average incomes. The distribution of women and men in various occupations has long differed, partly due to restrictions placed on women and pardy due to choices made by women themselves.

In times and places where women have been restricted from working outside the home, this limitation on the range of occupations open to women has in effect also been a limitation on their earnings prospects— again, even without whatever employer discrimination might or might not exist. Put differently, how much of male-female differences in income has been due to employer discrimination and how much to other differences arising from social restrictions or other factors is a question rather than a foregone conclusion. Many social restrictions, especially in the past, have been based on attempts to forestall problems growing out of the attraction of the sexes for one another.

In times, places, and social classes where a young woman's chastity was a prerequisite for favorable marriage prospects, her parents were often very concerned that she not only be kept from work environments or other environments where she would have unsupervised contact with young men, in order to avoid even the appearance of an unchaste life, much less the temptations that could result in an unwed pregnancy that could ruin her life and disgrace the family.

Work restrictions based on such concerns are inherently asymmetrical, since whatever troubles young men might encounter or create while working outside the home, these did not include anything so visible or with so much

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social and economic impact as becoming pregnant. In times and places when the cost of supporting an unwed daughter's child fell solely on her own family, the family sought to reduce the risk of this happening by much more severe restrictions on young women's freedom and much more monitoring of whom she associated with and under what conditions. However, during the era when agriculture was the predominant occupation of most people, working at home was less of a restriction than in later times, when more and more jobs were outside the home in industry and commerce.

As more societies became more industrial and commercial, the asymmetrical opportunities of young women and young men to work outside the home meant different income prospects. Even before then, families were more likely to allow young men to go off to work beyond parental supervision as apprentices, sailors, or soldiers.

Women, even when they did non-agricultural work, were more likely to do such work in the home, such as spinning cloth. The word "spinster" for unmarried women survives in the language today from that era. Brewing beer was another job that could be performed in a family enterprise and women who did this work were known as "brewsters," while men were called "brewers," both of these words eventually becoming family names, much as other occupations such as carpenter, weaver, cook, and shepherd also gave rise to family names.

While families had incentives to curtail women's work outside the home, employers had countervailing incentives to try to tap this large potential source of workers. Early New England mill owners, for example, tried to reassure parents of the safety and propriety of letting their daughters work in their businesses by having all-female workforces, often overseen by older women who in effect were chaperons, especially when the young women lived away from home. Even before the industrial era, highly respected and affluent families were likewise able to attract live-in maids, either because the supervision or reputation of these particular families were considered to be some assurance of lower risks of sexual misconduct or because the poorest families needed the daughter's earnings so much as to have little choice but to take chances that other families would not. The sexual molestation of servant girls by their employers, their employers' sons, or male servants, was

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among these dangers, as was the succumbing to temptation by the girls themselves.

Employers had very different reasons for segregating women from men at work, typically assigning them to different jobs. If an occupation was one that attracted predominandy males, the distraction of a female worker in their midst could adversely affect productivity, even if the woman herself was just as productive as the men. This was analogous to what also happened in times and places where ethnic or other differences among the workers adversely affected productivity on the job, though the distraction in this latter case was often due to animosities between Irish and Italian workers, for example, which interfered with their getting the work done, just as mutual attractions between women and men did.

Thus whole occupations could be off-limits to women simply because it was mostly men who worked in those occupations and the few women who might want to work in such occupations were not considered by employers to be worth the adverse effect which their presence could have on the productivity of the men. Where there were large numbers of women seeking work in these occupations, then the employer had the option of hiring both women and men, and segregating the sexes on the job, though maintaining such separation was not easy* What was easier was to have either all-male or all-female workforces.

Although physical strength is no longer as major a factor as it once was in the days when agriculture was the largest economic endeavor in most countries, or during the times when heavy industry or mining dominated

* One of the few modern employers who was able to do this successfully was the American Telephone &, Telegraph Company, when I worked in their New York headquarters in the 1960s. Even though there were women and men working in the same groups, somehow company policy became known without explicit public pronouncements and they avoided social contacts. How far this went was dramatized for me one day when my wife came over from our nearby apartment and joined me for lunch in a company cafeteria. After looking around this large facility, my wife said: "Do you realize that we are the only man and woman having lunch together in this whole place?" By the time I got back to work that afternoon, word had spread all over the office that I had been seen having lunch with a woman in the company cafeteria!

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various countries' economies, there are still particular industries today where considerable physical strength remains a requirement. Women are obviously not as likely to work in such fields as men are— and some of these are fields with jobs that pay more than the national average. While women have been 74 percent of what the U.S. Census Bureau classifies as "clerical and kindred workers," they have been less than 5 percent of "transport equipment operatives." In other words, women are far more likely to be sitting behind a desk than to be sitting behind the steering wheel of an eighteen-wheel truck. Women are also less than 4 percent of the workers in "construction, extraction, and maintenance." They are less than 3 percent of construction workers or loggers, less than 2 percent of roofers or masons, and less than one percent of the mechanics and technicians who service heavy vehicles and mobile equipment.1 9

Such occupational distributions have obvious economic implications, since miners earn nearly double the income of office clerks when both work full-time and year-round.2 0 There is still a premium paid for workers doing heavy physical work, as well as for hazardous work, which often overlaps work requiring physical strength. While men are 54 percent of the labor force, they are 92 percent of the job-related deaths.2 1

Continuity of Employment

Within the external limitations placed on the range of occupations open to women have been further limitations due to occupational choices made by women themselves. In addition to avoiding occupations requiring more physical strength than most women possess, women have tended to make career choices influenced by the likelihood that they would at some point or other become mothers. Since motherhood has usually entailed a period of withdrawal from full-time work outside the home, the cost of such withdrawal becomes a factor in occupational choices.

Where an occupation is unionized and withdrawal from the workforce means a loss of seniority, reducing the prospects of being promoted or of being retained during lay-offs, such an occupation in effect imposes costs on

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women that are likely to be greater than the costs imposed on men, as well as greater than in occupations where seniority is not such a factor or is no factor at all. However, even some non-unionized companies may have seniority systems which have the same economic effect, reducing women's earnings prospects more than those of men. Seniority is often also a factor in civil service jobs, likewise reducing women's earnings prospects more than those of men.

Quite aside from formal seniority rules, interruptions of labor force participation, in order to take care of small children until they are old enough to be placed in day care facilities while the mother returns to work outside the home, mean that a woman may have fewer years of job experience than a man of the same age, since such interruptions are less common among men. How much difference that makes in productivity on the job depends on the kind of work being done, so the difference it makes can range from considerable to trivial or non-existent, depending on the particular occupation. Where promotions over time are a normal part of a given career, not only are promotions less likely to come to a woman of a given age who does not have as much job experience as a man of the same age, the prospects of even a woman who has never had any interruption in her career are reduced to the extent that the likelihood of future interruptions because of her prospective role as mother can make placing her in a senior position more of a risk than placing a man of similar ability in that same position.

Interruptions in labor force participation have other costs which fall disproportionately on women. The occupational skills required change over time and at varying rates for different occupations. Rapidly changing computer technology, for example, means that computer engineers and programmers must be constandy upgrading their skills to keep up with advances in their field. Similarly, tax accountants must keep up with changing tax laws, and attorneys must keep up with changes in laws in general, in order to effectively serve their clientele— and therefore continue to have a clientele to serve. To drop out of such fields and then return in a few years after children have gotten old enough to be put into day care facilities can mean having fallen significantly behind developments in these