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Comparative Political Economy, Gender, and Labor Markets

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2009

Teri L. Caraway
Affiliation:
University of Minnesota

Extract

The publication in 2008 of Michael Ross's “Oil, Islam, and Women” by the discipline's flagship journal, the American Political Science Review, is a welcome development. It is the first empirical work with a primary focus on gender and political economy ever published in the journal and portends well for the development of research that focuses on such questions. My essay has two foci. The first is a critical engagement with Ross's analysis of why oil production negatively affects women's employment prospects. The second is how to further develop the study of gender in the comparative political economy of labor markets.

Type
Critical Perspectives on Gender and Politics
Copyright
Copyright © The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association 2009

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References

1. This essay draws extensively on arguments developed in my book Assembling Women: The Feminization of Global Manufacturing (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007).

2. I offer an alternative explanation for women's concentration in labor-intensive industries in Assembling Women, but in this essay I focus on variations in women's patterns of employment both due to space limitations and because a focus on variations better highlights the empirical and theoretical challenges that comparative political economists should attend to in their work.

3. It should also be noted that just because men do not bear children does not mean that they will stay in a job longer than women. Men leave for different reasons than women do. Since they have a wider variety and more attractive set of job opportunities available to them, men are more likely than women to go to work for another employer.