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460 A. Reichel, J. Brandl and W. Mayrhofer
(e.g. Bielby and Baron, 1984; Reskin et al., 1999). Third, explicitly targeting the status of
an occupation in organisations also allows for a more fine-grained study of the dependent
variable status. The great majority of gender studies have used income gaps as a proxy
for occupational status.
With the use of a large international sample that includes individual, organisational
and contextual variables, we also respond to calls for more comparative as well as
multilevel research, each of which holds the promise of a greater understanding of gender
composition effects.
2 Theoretical background
2.1 Relevance of gender as a category in the work context
Broadly speaking, three approaches have emerged in research on gender. The first is
mainly rooted in feminist research and stresses the continuing relevance of gender as a
category in work and in other contexts. In contrast, researchers mainly from a modernist
background claim an increasing irrelevance of gender as a category of difference in
modern societies. They point towards decreasing gender differences in various societal
segments. The third approach is rooted in the research on the concept of world society.
It holds a differentiated view claiming that there are areas in which gender inequalities
remain unchanged (e.g. income), but there are also fields where gender differentiation
has disappeared (e.g. law, access to education). In some areas, gender differentiation
depends on the prevalence of specific conditions. Context (especially work) is highlighted
as important (Heintz, 2001).
Authors stressing the ongoing importance of gender as a category basically follow the
argumentation of West and Zimmerman (1991) that gender is omnipresent and -relevant
and that ‘doing gender’ is unavoidable. Accordingly, they see gender differentiation as
very relevant for the constitution and legitimation of institutions and institutional systems
(Knapp, 2001). Gender as a category is constitutively embedded in the continuing
reproduction of gender inequality at work. Ridgeway (2001) argues that the ongoing
differentiation of employees according to their gender is due to interaction. In
interactions the use of the category gender is seen as unavoidable and in work life
interactions are inevitable. These processes lead to gendered labelling of occupations.
Specific work is arbitrarily associated with men or women (Gildemeister et al., 2003).
When there is a change in the dominance of one sex in an occupational field it is usually
connected to a re-interpretation of the occupation. This re-interpretation happens ex post.
After the change people try to create a fit between the respective occupation and the sex
that has newly gained dominance in the occupation. This process is highly selective and
arbitrary. The female- or male-dominated occupation is integrated into a coherent system
of reference and accepted as ‘typical’ female or male. In order to find social acceptance,
these patterns of assignment and definition of male and female work need to appear
plausible. The basis for plausibility in ‘doing gender’ (Seeg, 2000, p.40) processes is
gained through analogy building between the occupation and other activities coherent