Another Working Women’s Stereotype Totters : Job Turnover Rates Are No Higher for Females, Study Finds

Contrary to a stereotype perpetuated by many civilian employers and military officers, young women who take jobs traditionally held by men don’t have turnover rates higher than their male co-workers, a Rand Corp. study set for release next week concludes.

The observation specifically contradicts an assumption that the report says is often made by employers: that women will leave the work force prematurely--to be married or bear children--and waste costly training for skilled positions.

Footholds Barred

The stereotype, women’s groups have long complained, unfairly precludes women from gaining a foothold in many jobs--particularly in blue-collar fields--long dominated by men.

And in a finding that has surprised some nationally prominent experts on women in the work force, the Rand team also notes that girls aged 14 to 17 who have been reared in single-parent households headed by women are much more likely to settle into traditionally male jobs than girls who grew up in two-parent homes.

That is most likely, the Rand researchers say, because the shock value of seeing their mothers struggle to cope economically after divorce or the death of a spouse persuades teen-age girls that they must seek the monetary security of work in male fields, where financial rewards are greatest. The finding appears to fit Anglo and Latino women, but not blacks--perhaps because female-headed households have long been an established fixture of black society.

Nonetheless, the finding about girls reared in female-headed households flies in the face of time-honored assumptions that girls reared in two-parent homes--the traditional American ideal--are more likely to develop the ambition and self-confidence required to establish themselves in traditionally men-only fields.

Moreover, in a study that focused more on blue-collar occupations than the professions--one of the first of its type to concentrate on this component of the female labor force--the Rand team observed that the brightest, most intelligent 14-year-old girls are the ones most likely to gravitate eventually to male-dominated lines of work. Based on a battery of intelligence tests, the researchers concluded that less bright girls will more likely be attracted to homemaking and those occupations with which women are traditionally associated.

The report--scheduled for official release Monday--is one of the first results of a far-ranging research program financed by the Ford Foundation and based primarily on data gathered for the U.S. Department of Labor in which the career choices, job performance and backgrounds of nearly 13,000 women who were 14 to 19 when the study began in 1979 are being followed for several years.

The analysis was done by Rand researchers Linda J. Waite and Sue E. Berryman, both sociologists. The analysis included elaborate statistical controls to avoid unforeseen biasing of the results.

The survey data gathered in the study is among the best bodies of raw information ever assembled in the field, according to Joan Huber, dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Ohio State University. Huber reviewed some of the Rand findings last year.

Specifically, the Rand team found that:

--For women working in primarily blue-collar jobs traditionally held by men, there is virtually no difference in turnover rates as compared with male employees. “This finding has major implications for the gender desegregation model,” Waite and Berryman concluded. “For women to penetrate such industries in any significant way, they have to be pervasively employed in traditionally male occupations. Our results do not support the exclusion of women . . . on grounds of turnover rates greater than those . . . for women in traditionally female occupations.”

--If a girl is in a female-headed household at age 14, the likelihood that she will pick a job traditionally held by men is increased by 8%. Moreover, girls with higher intelligence are more likely to pick male-only jobs because “ability is rewarded in labor markets, but not necessarily in marriage markets.” The team concluded that “living in an intact, versus a female-headed, household should affect what lessons daughters learn from their mothers’ lives. Daughters in female-headed households will see their mothers either as negative models or as male models. (In either case) this should increase the chances that they will choose traditionally male occupations.”

--Girls whose mothers work in blue-collar fields likewise have an 8% greater chance of selecting employment in traditionally male-only jobs. Yet a corresponding analysis of young men working in traditionally female positions concluded that civilian men in women-only jobs show a lower turnover rate than women in the same fields.

--Girls and women in the study picked traditionally male jobs 19.5% of the time, and women were far less likely than boys and men to make career choices within sexual stereotypes. Nearly 76% of boys and men chose traditionally male jobs, while only 47.2% of girls and women picked traditionally female lines of work. A third of the girls and women and 22% of the boys and men selected employment in jobs where the work force is about evenly divided between the sexes.

--Though their turnover rates were not unlike those of men, the employed young women in the survey still exhibited a “very high” overall turnover rate. In civilian jobs, just 44% of the young women employed in 1979 when the study began were working at the same job a year later. A total of 30% changed jobs and 26% were unemployed when a follow-up survey was conducted. Women in traditionally male jobs in the military were far more stable, with only 20% leaving the service in the same one-year period. The Rand team speculated that military recruitment policies and enlistment contracts that bind young soldiers to specific terms of service may be responsible.

Turnover rates for men and women were strikingly similar, the team found. Of young men working in 1979 and not in school, for instance, 57% had left their employer within a year, versus 55% of women working full time and not attending school. Military service turnover rates were 22% for men and 21% for women after one year.

--Careers in the military--even though women are prohibited by law from being assigned to combat jobs--will likely have for women the same effect that military service has traditionally had for disenfranchised minority groups. As women gain technical training on the same footing as men in the military, their eventual exit into the civilian employment market will increasingly diminish the domination of men in a variety of traditionally male jobs.

Because military service has what may be called a “demonstration effect” for civilian employment, the longer the combat duty prohibition exists, the Rand researchers argued, the more it will become an issue bearing on equal economic and employment rights for women. “Thus, the country’s verbal and legal war over whether women should be trained and used in combat can ultimately be seen as a war over women’s rights and obligations,” Waite and Berryman concluded, “not only in the military, but also in the larger society.”

Special Significance

The team noted that it is especially significant that of civilian jobs in which men are most firmly entrenched--the most male-dominated of all fields and those in which fewer than 10% of workers have traditionally not been male--a total of 34% of women in the military are now assigned, versus only 3% of the civilian population.

In a telephone interview from New York, where she was traveling, Berryman said it remains uncertain whether, over the next decade, trends identified in the new Rand study will continue or slow--perhaps because American society is unprepared to deal effectively with the unavoidable problem of how the children raised by women working in more varied fields can be cared for.

“I think it’s going to be very tough to predict what will happen, because of the whole issue of children,” Berryman said. “As long as we have children, we’re faced with the very tough question about raising them. When men have to do it, will they be more apt to turn down jobs that are more demanding in terms of time commitments? How is the society going to negotiate out the rearing of children and, at the same time, the working of parents?

Real Sticking Point

“That’s going to be the real sticking point. (If) companies and other institutions don’t minimize the kinds of conflicts that the work and family situation presents, I have the feeling that you’re never going to have truly major shifts of women into traditionally male occupations.”

Berryman said a solution may be that, in concert with the increasing longevity recorded in American society, both men and women may find ways to spread out the major activities of human society--education, career selection and procreation--that now are clustered into the first three decades of a person’s life. “I don’t know how it is going to sort out and I don’t think there is any simple answer,” she said.

In an interview at Rand headquarters in Santa Monica, Waite noted that social evolution during the last decade or so has effectively opened most professions to women. What remains conspicuously lacking, she said, is a corresponding change in blue-collar fields--jobs ranging from truck driver and construction tradesperson to steelworker, police officer or firefighter.

Sophisticated Statistics

Waite said she and Berryman used an extremely sophisticated statistical model in analyzing their data, to make certain that they didn’t overlook some influential variable in drawing their conclusion that women simply don’t leave traditionally male jobs at a rate greater than men. “We looked and we looked and we looked and we looked,” said Waite, and found no significant differences.

Janice DeGooyer, director of research at the Washington-based National Commission on Working Women, a private group, said the new Rand report apparently lends added weight to insistence by women that the higher turnover argument is invalid. “It used to be true that women were in and out of the work force a lot, but that is less and less and less true in the last few years,” said DeGooyer. “The vast majority of women are in the work force because they have to be. By and large, women enter traditionally male occupations because they can’t get pay comparable to men if they don’t.”