Marketization and Gender Segregation in Urban China.

This paper focuses on the emergent form of economic segmentation and its impact on gender segregation and gender-based earnings differentials in urban China. I argue that a new logic of economic segmentation has emerged during the market transition, altering the relative amount of economic returns to jobs, changing the structural features of job queues. As a result, new patterns of gender segregation emerged. To test this hypothesis, I use data at three levels: a 1995 national sample of individual workers, industry-sector data for 1990 and 1995, and city-level data for 1995. The findings indicate that gender segregation follows the new logic of economic segmentation introduced by the marketization: male workers have penetrated into jobs that have gained in earnings while squeezing out female workers from these high-paying jobs; driven out of lucrative jobs, female workers made inroads into the state sector, now that this sector is becoming differentiated and that its relative economic advantage wanes. Further analysis based on a series of multilevel cross-classified models suggests that in the most marketized cities, workers of both sexes in jobs with high rates of female entry are penalized in earnings, indicating that the negative effect of job feminization on earnings accentuates in the most marketized cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]