Abstract: Occupational Sex Segregation in the Former East and West Germanies by Heike Trappe (Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany) and Rachel A. Rosenfeld (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA)

The traditional ideology of the gendered family is that men are the breadwinners and women are primarily family care givers.  One manifestation of this ideology is mothers’ lower employment rates.  However, this ideology–and the realities of parenthood and worker roles that result from it-- are also at work within the labor force, shaping the sorts of jobs women and men hold.  This paper focuses on occupational sex segregation among young adults in the 1970s and 1980s in the former East Germany (German Democratic Republic, GDR) and West German (the old Federal Republic of Germany, FRG).  In this paper we address two questions.  First: What was the level and nature of occupational sex segregation in the two countries before unification?  Second: How was occupational sex segregation related to family formation in the East and the West?  In our conclusions, we will discuss a third issue, that of the nature of occupational sex segregation after unification. 

By most measures, West Germany has a moderately high level of occupational gender segregation, not as high as Sweden or Switzerland, but higher than the US.  Even nine years after the former GDR ceased to exist, however, it is unclear how segregated women's and men's occupations really were.  Differences in gender ideology, family policies, and labor needs suggest that the level and nature of occupational gender segregation may have varied between the two countries.  On the one hand, the GDR’s ideology of gender equality through employment and high post-War labor needs would suggest less segregation overall than in the FRG, especially in crucial, predominately-male occupations.  And indeed this was state intention and public perception.  On the other hand, the more extensive maternal benefits in the GDR may have led to more statistical discrimination against women entering positions of authority and important technical crafts because of the expectation that almost all women would take child leave.  In addition, the high female labor force participation in East Germany, compared with the relatively low level in West Germany, may have indicated that there was less selection of women into the labor force in the East and therefore more representation in predominately women’s occupations.  Such arguments are often used to explain the high level of gender segregation in Sweden, despite its egalitarian ideals. 

What we have found in our preliminary work, and as selected data from official statistics show, is that occupational segregation was high in the East, and higher than in the West.  It is still possible that as a result of the post-War labor shortage, firms in the GDR had to use less-preferred workers, i.e., women, for “male” jobs that in the FRG were filled by male immigrants and guest workers.  In the GDR, then, women may have been more likely to be in what in the FRG were predominately male occupations.

In addition, for reasons similar to those above, the relation between sex-typicality of occupation and family formation may have been different between the countries.   In the GDR, extensive support for employed mothers may have led to occupational sex segregation less related to actual family status because of statistical discrimination on the part of enterprises and/or women’s preferences.  In the West, we may find more association between family roles and the gender type of occupation if women were more likely to choose between higher education and less stereotypical careers and early marriage and childbearing.  Both countries essentialized parenthood as motherhood in their family policies, but they differed in the relationship they encouraged between the mother and worker role.

To test these hypotheses we use data from the German Life History Studies collected at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.  We use information on the birth cohorts 1954-56 and 1959-61 in West Germany and 1951-53 and 1959-61 in East Germany and follow their educational, occupational, and family histories until 1988/89.  These are cohorts entering the labor force after the establishment of the two countries and the pre-1961 immigration west.  In addition to the very detailed individual-level life histories, we have the most detailed information on the distribution of women and men across occupations available from the 1987 FRG and 1981 GDR population censuses.   These data will allow us to  compare the nature of occupational sex segregation and its relationship to family lives for young people in both countries before unification.

In addition, we will be able to use microcensus data from the mid-1990 to see how much sex segregation has changed since unification and will speculate on forces behind such changes.