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Work and Occupations
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DOI: 10.1177/0730888402029004003
2002 29: 428Work and Occupations
CATHERINE HAKIM
Lifestyle Preferences as Determinants of Women's Differentiated Labor Market Careers
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10.1177/073088802237558WORK AND OCCUPATIONSHakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS
Longitudinal studies have shown the long-term impact of attitudes, values, and aspirations on
labor market behavior and outcomes. However, sociological theory has so far failed to incorporate
this new knowledge. Preference theory does so, positing that recent social and economic
changes give women genuine choices for the first time in history. A 1999 national survey in Britain
shows that women choose three distinct combinations of market work and family work: They
have home-centered, work-centered, or adaptive lifestyle preferences. The survey confirms that
lifestyle preferences are a major determinant of fertility, employment patterns, and job choice.
However, lifestyle preferences no longer determine occupational choice.
Lifestyle Preferences as Determinants
of Women’s Differentiated Labor
Market Careers
CATHERINE HAKIM
London School of Economics
The United States was one of the first countries to develop large-scale longitudinal
studies of labor market participation, including the groundbreaking
National Longitudinal Surveys (NLS) and the Panel Study of
Income Dynamics (PSID), both initiated in the 1960s and subsequently copied
in many European countries (Hakim, 2000a, pp. 109-126). In the 1970s
and 1980s, these studies started to reveal the major, long-term impact of attitudes,
values, and aspirations on labor market behavior and outcomes, especially
on women’s employment patterns. These results were obtained despite
the fact that the longitudinal studies were primarily designed by and for labor
economists and sociologists with relatively little input from social psychologists.
So the questions on attitudes included in the interview surveys were
parsimonious rather than extensive. Nonetheless, they were found to have
substantial predictive power, even at the level of a single question on future
work plans. These discoveries have not been given the attention and weight
428
Author’s Note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Catherine Hakim, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics, Houghton
Street, London WC2A 2AE, England.
WORK AND OCCUPATIONS, Vol. 29 No. 4, November 2002 428-459
DOI: 10.1177/073088802237558
© 2002 Sage Publications
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they deserve, perhaps because sociologists and economists tend to be wary of
attitude data and their notorious volatility.
So far, there has been no attempt to incorporate these findings from longitudinal
studies into sociological theory—particularly into theorizing on
women’s labor force participation. There is still a tendency for researchers to
keep attitude data at arm’s length, to focus on apparently objective and factual
information about the characteristics of individuals, households, employers,
and industries. Sociological theory and research on female labor force participation
has remained stuck between human capital theory and institutional
explanations of labor market outcomes, especially pay. Textbooks typically
present human capital theory, then go on to challenge it with the motley collection
of references to institutional constraints, social networks, historical
change, cross-cultural comparisons, and feminist theories that currently provide
the substance of sociology of work and employment courses (Blau &
Ferber, 1992; Crompton, 1997; Grint, 1991; Jacobsen, 1994; Reskin &
Padavic, 1994). The dividing line between economic textbooks and sociology
textbooks on female employment seems to be getting fainter over time.
The classic journal article, or sociology student project, seems to be to compare
and contrast human capital and institutional theories in relation to a particular
data set, social process, or case study, with neither contender gaining
ascendancy—as illustrated by the contributions to Glass (1999).
In Europe, the expansion and consolidation of the European Union (EU)
has stimulated cross-national comparative studies of EU and Organization
for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member states. These
comparative studies of modern societies generally focus on macro-level theories
and classifications of societies that purport to explain institutional and
cultural differences between countries on a broad level. In the process, microlevel
theories that focus on individual motivation and preferences are overlooked
or even sidelined—as illustrated by Van Doorne-Huiskes, van Hoof,
and Roelofs (1995); Blossfeld and Hakim (1997); O’Reilly and Fagan
(1998); Rubery, Smith, Fagan, and Grimshaw (1998); and Blossfeld and
Drobnic (2001). On the rare occasions when institutional-structural theories
are pitted against theories focusing on individual choices, preferences, and
intentionality, the latter tend to win—as illustrated by Gambetta’s (1987)
study based on Italian data sets, Were They Pushed or Did They Jump?
The apocryphal definitions are that economics is about how people make
choices, whereas sociology explains why people have no choices to make.
Preference theory breaks with the sociological tradition of giving primacy to
social structural and institutional factors. It also rejects the economist tradition
of assuming that preferences are stable and homogeneous enough not to
require direct empirical investigation and that preferences are revealed
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 429
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through behavior. Preference theory builds on the important research findings
from U.S. and European longitudinal studies to give a central role to lifestyle
preferences and values as determinants of women’s and men’s employment
decisions. Preference theory provides a new explanation for labor
market participation and outcomes, especially for women.
This article first summarizes key findings on the impact of values and personal
goals from the U.S. longitudinal studies. It then outlines preference theory
and explains why the United States and Britain currently provide the
main case study settings for tests and development of the theory.1
Following
this, the article describes a 1999 British national survey used to
operationalize, test, and develop the theory. The subsequent sections assess
the utility of the theory for predicting female employment patterns, occupational
choice, and fertility. In the process, the article challenges the utility of
human capital theory and argues that institutional constraints are important
only at the margins.
THE IMPACT OF VALUES AND PERSONAL GOALS
From the 1960s on, the NLS provided longitudinal data that allowed the
long-term influence, or insignificance, of work orientations and work plans
to be measured rigorously. Of particular interest is the cohort of young
women aged 14 to 24 in 1968 who were interviewed almost every year up to
1983 when aged 29 to 39 years. These women were asked in 1968, and again
at every subsequent interview, what they would like to be doing when they
were 35 years old—whether they planned to be working or to marry, keep
house, and raise a family.2
Compared to the length and complexity of work
commitment questions included in some surveys (Bielby & Bielby, 1984),
the question is crude and conflates preferences and plans. But presumably,
because it asked about women’s personal plans rather than generalized
approval/disapproval attitudes, the question turned out to have astonishing
analytical and predictive power and was used again in the second youth
cohort study initiated in 1979.
There are a number of independent analyses of the extent to which early
work plans were fulfilled by age 35. They all show that women achieved their
objectives for the most part, resulting in dramatic “mark-ups” to career planners
in terms of occupational grade and earnings (Mott, 1982; Rexroat &
Shehan, 1984; Shaw & Shapiro, 1987). Furthermore, career planners were
more likely to choose typically male jobs, had lower job satisfaction than
other women, and adapted their fertility behavior to their work plans (Spitze
& Waite, 1980; Stolzenberg & Waite, 1977; Waite & Stolzenberg, 1976).
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Work plans were a significant independent predictor of actual work behavior.
After controlling for other factors affecting labor force participation, a
woman who consistently planned to work had a probability of working that
was 30 percentage points higher than did a woman who consistently planned
not to work. Of the women who held consistently to their work plans, four
fifths were actually working in 1980, at age 35, compared to only half of the
women who consistently intended to devote themselves exclusively to homemaker
activities. Women who planned to work at age 35 were likely to do so
unless they had large families or a pre-school child. Women who had planned
a “marriage career” nevertheless were obliged to work by economic factors
in half the cases: Their husbands’ low income, divorce, or the opportunity
cost of not working led half to be in work despite aiming for a full-time homemaker
role.
Planning to work yielded a significant wage advantage. Women who had
consistently planned to work had wages 30% higher than those of women
who never planned to work. Those women who had planned to work in the
occupation they actually held at age 35 had even higher wages than women
whose occupational plans were not realized. Women who made realistic
plans and acquired necessary skills fared best in the labor market. Those who
fared worst were women who planned an exclusive homemaking career but
ended up working for economic reasons. However, career planners were a
small minority of one quarter of the young women cohort; a vast majority of
the women had unplanned careers (see Table 1), as did women in the older
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 431
TABLE 1: Young Women’s Work Plans and Outcomes in the United States (in
percentages)
Working at
Distribution Age 35
Homemaker careers: Consistently indicate no plans
for work: aim is marriage, family, and homemaking
activities 28 49
Drifters and unplanned careers: 47 64
Highly variable responses over time, no clear pattern
in plans for age 35 (35)
Switch to having future work expectations at some
point in their 20s (12)
Career planners: Consistently anticipate working at
age 35 throughout their 20s 25 82
SOURCE: Derived from Shaw and Shapiro (1987, Tables 2 and 3, reporting National
Longitudinal Surveys data for the cohort of young women first interviewed in 1968 when
aged 14 to 24).
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NLS cohort aged 30 to 44 years at the start of the study in the late 1960s
(Mott, 1978, 1982; Shaw, 1983).3
As far back as the 1970s, the NLS longitudinal data overturned the results
of cross-sectional studies showing that women’s work behavior is heavily
determined by the number and ages of any children rather than the other way
round. Those who work only if their family responsibilities permit them to do
so are in effect fulfilling a prior choice of emphasis on the homemaker career.
Fertility expectations have only a small negative effect on young women’s
work plans, whereas work plans exert a powerful negative effect on young
women’s childbearing plans (Sproat, Churchill, & Sheets, 1985, p. 78;
Stolzenberg & Waite, 1977; Waite & Stolzenberg, 1976). Factors that have
long been held to determine women’s labor force participation, such as other
family income, educational qualifications, marital status, and age of youngest
child were revealed as being most important in relation to women with
little or no work commitment, who have so far been in the majority. Women
with definite career plans manifested a rather inelastic labor supply, similar to
that of men (Shaw & Shapiro, 1987).4
Overall, the NLS results have repeatedly shown the importance of motivations,
values, and attitudes as key determinants of labor market behavior,
occupational status, and even earnings, an influence that is independent of
conventional human capital factors and frequently exceeds the influence of
behavioral factors (Andrisani, 1978; Mott, 1982; Parnes, 1975; Sproat et al.,
1985). These “psychological” variables are too often omitted from research,
so their importance has been overlooked.5
Similar results emerge from other longitudinal studies on the rare occasions
when researchers address the long-term impact of values and life goals.
Attitudes have an especially strong impact on women’s behavior because
women have genuine choices to make regarding employment versus homemaking.
But attitudes and values have also been shown to have a major
impact on men. For example, two Hungarians, Szekelyi and Tardos (1993),
analyzed 20 years of PSID microdata for the period between 1968 to 1988 to
show that people who plan ahead and express confidence and optimism about
their plans subsequently earn significantly higher incomes than those who do
not, after controlling for initial levels of income, education, age, sex, race,
type of area, and region. The long-term effects of attitudes were stronger than
short-term effects. The impact of optimistic planning on earnings was
smaller than the impact of education, sex, and initial income in 1967 (if
included), but it was larger than the impact of age, race, and locational variables.
Attitudes affected the earnings of both male heads of households and
their wives.
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Similar results are reported by Duncan and Dunifon (1998) from another
analysis of 24 years of PSID data, this time covering men only. Motivation (as
measured in men in their early 20s) had a large impact on long-term success
(as measured by hourly earnings 16 to 20 years later), and the effect remained
after controlling for other factors. Only a small part of the impact of motivation
worked through its effect on greater investment in training and education;
a substantial part remained after this control. The study showed that values
commonly found among women, such as religiosity (as measured by
church attendance) and a preference for affiliation (as measured by a preference
for friendly and sociable work settings rather than challenging work settings),
had negative effects on earnings. Work orientations that emphasized
challenge rather than affiliation and a clear sense of personal efficacy boosted
earnings in the early 40s.
In sum, there is already substantial evidence that attitudes, values, and life
goals have important impacts on outcomes in adult life for men as well as
women. However, there has been no attempt to integrate this new knowledge
into sociological theory, and empirical studies routinely ignore these substantive
findings.6
PREFERENCE THEORY
Preference theory is a new theory to explain women’s choices between
market work and family work. The theory is historically informed, empirically
based, multidisciplinary, prospective rather than retrospective in orientation,
and applicable in all rich modern societies. The four central tenets of
preference theory are listed in Table 2. The first is that five historical changes
have collectively produced a qualitatively new scenario for women in rich
modern societies in the 21st century, giving them options that were not previously
available. True, small elites of women born into wealthy families or
prosperous families with liberal ideas, did sometimes have real choices in the
past just as their brothers did. Today, genuine choices are open to women in
the sense that a vast majority of women have choices, not only very particular
subgroups in the population. The five separate changes in society and in the
labor market started only in the late 20th century and are now producing a
qualitatively different and new scenario of options and opportunities for
womeninthe21stcentury.The five conditionsthat createanewscenarioare
• The contraceptive revolution that, from about 1965 on, gave sexually active
women reliable and independent control over their own fertility for the first
time in history
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 433
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• The equal opportunities revolution, which ensured that for the first time in history,
women obtained equal access to all positions, occupations, and careers in
the labor market. Sometimes, this was extended to posts in the public sphere
more generally. In some countries, legislation prohibiting sex discrimination
goes much wider than just the labor market, giving women equal access to housing,
financial services, and other public services
• The expansion of white-collar occupations, which are far more attractive to
women that most blue-collar occupations
• The creation of jobs for secondary earners: people who do not want to give priority
to paid work at the expense of other life interests
• The increasing importance of attitudes, values, and personal preferences in the
lifestyle choices of prosperous, liberal, modern societies.
The five changes are historically specific developments in any society. They
are not automatic and do not necessarily occur in all modern societies. They
may not occur together at a single point in time in a country. The timing of the
five changes varies greatly between countries. The effects of the five changes
are cumulative. The two revolutions are essential and constitute the core of
the social revolution for women. The five changes collectively are necessary
to create a new scenario in which women have genuine choices and female
heterogeneity is revealed to its full extent.
In Western Europe, North America, and other modern societies, these five
changes only took place from the 1960s on. The timing and pace of change
has varied even between countries in Europe. However, the strong social, cultural,
economic, and political links between modern countries suggest that no
country will lag behind on any of the changes indefinitely. All five changes
were completed early in the United States and Britain, so that the new scenario
was well established by the last two decades of the 20th century in these
two countries, unlike in the rest of Europe.7
A review of recent research evidence (Hakim, 2000b) shows that once
genuine choices are open to them, women choose three different lifestyles:
home-centered, work-centered, or adaptive (see Table 3). These divergent
preferences are found at all levels of education and in all social classes.
Adaptive women prefer to combine employment and family work without
giving a fixed priority to either. They want to enjoy the best of both worlds.
Adaptive women are generally the largest group among women and will be
found in substantial numbers in most occupations. Certain occupations, such
as teaching, are attractive to women because they facilitate an even workfamily
balance. A great majority of the women who transfer to part-time
work after they have children are adaptive, seeking to devote as much time
and effort to their family work as to their jobs. In some countries, and in some
occupations, part-time jobs are still rare, so other types of job are chosen. For
example, seasonal jobs, temporary work, or term-time jobs all offer a better
434 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
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work-family balance than the typical full-time job, especially if commuting
is also involved.
Work-centered women are a minority, despite the massive influx of
women into higher education and into higher grades of work in the past three
decades. Work-centered people (men and women) are focused on competitive
activities in the public sphere—in careers, sport, politics, or the arts.
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 435
TABLE 2: The Four Central Tenets of Preference Theory
1. Five separate historical changes in society and in the labor market that started in
the late 20th century are producing a qualitatively different and new scenario of
options and opportunities for women. The five changes do not necessarily occur in
all modern societies and do not always occur together. Their effects are cumulative.
The five causes of a new scenario are
• The contraceptive revolution that, from about 1965 on, gave sexually active
women reliable control over their own fertility for the first time in history
• The equal opportunities revolution, which ensured that for the first time in history,
women had equal access to all positions, occupations, and careers in the
labor market. In some countries, legislation prohibiting sex discrimination went
further to give women equal access to housing, financial services, public services,
and public posts
• The expansion of white-collar occupations, which are far more attractive to
women than most blue-collar occupations
• The creation of jobs for secondary earners: people who do not want to give priority
to paid work at the expense of other life interests
• The increasing importance of attitudes, values, and personal preferences in the
lifestyle choices of affluent modern societies.
2. Women are heterogeneous in their preferences and priorities on the conflict between
family and employment. In the new scenario, they are therefore heterogeneous
also in their employment patterns and work histories. These preferences
are set out, as ideal types, in Table 3. The size of the three groups varies in rich
modern societies because public policies usually favor one or another group.
3. The heterogeneity of women’s preferences and priorities creates conflicting interests
between groups of women: sometimes between home-centered women and
work-centered women, sometimes between the middle group of adaptive women
and women who have one firm priority (whether for family work or employment).
The conflicting interests of women have given a great advantage to men, whose
interests are comparatively homogeneous; this is one cause of patriarchy and its
disproportionate success.
4. Women’s heterogeneity is the main cause of women’s variable responses to social
engineering policies in the new scenario of modern societies. This variability of response
has been less evident in the past, but it has still impeded attempts to predict
women’s fertility and employment patterns. Policy research and future predictions
of women’s choices will be more successful in the future if they adopt the
preference theory perspective and first establish the distribution of preferences between
family work and employment in each society.
SOURCE: Hakim (2000b).
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436 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
TABLE 3: Classification of Women’s Work-Lifestyle Preferences in the 21st
Century
Home-Centered Adaptive Work-Centered
20% of women
varies from 10% to 30%
60% of women
varies from 40% to 80%
20% of women
varies from 10% to 30%
Family life and children
are the main priorities
throughout life.
This group is most diverse and
includes women who want to
combine work and family,
plus drifters and unplanned ca-
reers.
Childless women are
concentrated here. Main
priority in life is employment
or equivalent
activities in the public
arena: politics, sport,
art, etc.
Prefer not to work. Want to work but not totally
committed to work career.
Committed to work or
equivalent activities.
Qualifications obtained
as cultural capital.
Qualifications obtained with
the intention of working.
Large investment in
qualifications/training
for employment or
other activities.
Number of children is
affected by government
social policy, family
wealth, etc. Not
responsive to employment
policy.
This group is very responsive to
government social policy,
employment policy,
equal opportunities policy/
propaganda,
economic cycle/recession/
growth, etc.
Responsive to things such as
income tax and social welfare
benefits,
educational policies,
school timetables,
child care services,
public attitude toward working
women,
legislation promoting female
employment,
trade union attitudes to working
women,
availability of part-time work
and similar work flexibility,
economic growth and
prosperity,
and institutional factors
generally.
Responsive to economic
opportunity, political
opportunity, artistic
opportunity, etc. Not
responsive to social/
family policy.
SOURCE: Hakim (2000b).
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Family life is fitted around their work, and many of these women remain
childless, even when married. Qualifications and training are obtained as a
career investment rather than as an insurance policy, as with the adaptive
group. A majority of men are work-centered, compared to only a minority of
women. Preference theory predicts that men will retain their dominance in
the labor market, politics, and other competitive activities because only a
minority of women are prepared to prioritize their jobs (or other activities in
the public sphere) in the same way as men. This will be unwelcome news to
many feminists who have assumed that women would be just as likely as men
to be work-centered once opportunities were opened to them and that sex discrimination
alone has so far held women back from the top jobs in any
society.
The third group, home-centered women, is also a minority, and a relatively
invisible one given the current media focus on working women and high
achievers. Home-centered women prefer to give priority to home and family
life after they marry. They are most inclined to have larger families, and they
prefer to avoid paid work after marriage except in times of financial stress.
They do not necessarily invest less in qualifications, because the educational
system functions as a marriage market as well as a training institution
(Hakim, 2000b, pp. 193-222). However, they are less likely to choose vocational
courses and are more likely to take courses in the arts, humanities, or
social sciences.
The three preference groups are set out, as sociological ideal types, in
Table 3, with estimates of the relative sizes of the three groups in societies,
such as Britain, where public policy does not bias the distribution.8
In practice,
in most societies, public policy is biased toward one group or another, by
accident or by design, so that the exact percentages vary across societies.
These three lifestyles are not merely different. They sometimes bring
women into conflict with each other—for example, on whether public child
care services are necessary or whether positive discrimination in favor of
women for promotion to top jobs is a good thing. In a sense, there is no single,
representative group of women in modern society, but three contrasting, even
conflicting groups with sharply differentiated work and lifestyle preferences.
In the United States, the conflict between work-centered and home-centered
women has been expressed through the two women’s movements: the feminist
“women’s liberation” movement and the maternalist movement, with
conflict often focused on the issues of abortion and the Equal Rights
Amendment.
The United States and Britain currently provide the prime examples of
societies that have achieved the new scenario for women. This does not mean
that sex discrimination has been entirely eliminated in the two countries. As
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definitions of sex discrimination keep expanding, from direct discrimination
to increasingly arcane forms of indirect discrimination, this battle is arguably
never won. However, both countries have trenchant equal opportunities legislation,
backed up and enforced by a system of tribunals, equal opportunities
commissions, and other tangible public and political support for converting
the letter of the law into reality. Some European countries still have little or
nothing to support and actively enforce equal opportunities legislation, so
that little has changed in practice.9
Equally important, Britain and the United
States both have large and diverse populations, ensuring that cultural diversity
and differences in values become accepted and even welcomed. Many
European countries have not yet come to terms with the ethnic, religious, and
cultural diversity that generally ensues from decades of immigration.
Identifying Britain and the United States as two countries that have
achieved the new scenario for women does not mean convergence can be
expected in work rates and lifestyle choices in these countries. Even the most
liberal society and laissez faire polity still has institutions, laws, customs,
national policies, and cultural constraints that shape and structure behavior.
Choices are not made in a vacuum. Social and economic factors still matter
and will produce national variations in employment patterns and lifestyle
choices. In addition, the choices people make are molded by an unpredictable
circus of events: economic recessions and booms, wars, and changes of government;
as well as events in private lives, individual ability, accidents or ill
health, “disastrous” marriages and “brilliant” marriages. For example, Britain
and the United States differ in the size and character of their part-time
workforces. Universal and free access to health care in Britain means that
people are free to choose their job and working hours, and even whether to
work at all, without regard to employer health benefits. In the United States,
health insurance benefits are a key feature of full-time jobs that bias choice
away from part-time work or nonwork. Adaptive women who would take
permanent part-time jobs in Britain, or not work at all, will opt for full-time
jobs in the United States. As a result, there are differences between the two
countries in work rates and patterns of employment.
In sum, lifestyle preferences determine
• women’s fertility, both childlessness and—for the majority who do have children—family
size;
• women’s employment pattern over the lifecycle: choices between careers and
jobs, full-time and part-time work, and associated job values; and
• women’s responsiveness to public policies, employer policies, and economic
and social circumstances.
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Preferences do not predict outcomes with complete certainty, even when
women have genuine choices, because of variations in individual abilities
and factors in the social and economic environment. However, in prosperous
modern societies, preferences become a much more important determinant,
maybe even the primary determinant of women’s employment patterns.
THE 1999 BRITISH SURVEY
Preference theory is empirically based in that it was built up from a review
and synthesis of hundreds of social science studies in several disciplines
using a huge variety of research methods. The aim in the project reported here
was to pick out the smallest possible number of survey questions and indicators
appropriate to a structured interview survey that could be used to identify
the three lifestyle preference groups among women. This had previously
been done most effectively by qualitative studies based on in-depth interviews,
as illustrated by Gerson’s brilliant study of how women decide about
motherhood and careers (Gerson, 1985, Table C22; Hakim, 2000b, pp. 149-
154). The aim was to identify classificatory questions and variables that
might be included in any large survey.
The survey was carried out as one of 27 projects selected for an Economic
and Social Research Council (ESRC) Research Programme on the Future of
Work running over 5 years (1998-2003) in Britain. The interview survey was
carried out for the author by the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in Britain
in January and February 1999.
The survey was based on a probability random sample of households and
face-to-face interviews with one person aged 16 or older chosen randomly
within each household. The proportion of households in which the selected
informant was the head of household or spouse was 81% in our sample. From
a sample of 5,388 eligible addresses, an overall response rate of 68% was
achieved, producing data for a nationally representative sample of 3,651 persons
aged 16 and older in Britain. Refusals accounted for 24% of the initial
sample, and noncontacts for another 8%.
The final sample included 1,691 men and 1,960 women, with a substantial
proportion (20%) aged 65 and older. Excluding the pensioners reduces the
sample for the population of working age to 2,900, including 2,345 from married
and cohabiting couples.
The survey was used to operationalize the identification of lifestyle preferences
in the context of a large-scale structured interview survey, to test the
classification against women’s lifestyle choices and behavior, and to explore
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 439
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further applications of the taxonomy in sociological research on women’s
employment.10
Apart from Tables 1, 2, and 3, all tables presented here are from the 1999
British survey.11
PREFERENCES AND LIFESTYLE CHOICES
Three questions were used to operationalize lifestyle preferences. Two
questions were taken from the Eurobarometer series.12
The third, a question
on work commitment, has been widely used, in slightly different versions, in
research on work orientations in the United States and Britain. Table 4 shows
the three questions, the index of work centrality produced by combining
Questions 2 and 3, and the distribution of lifestyle preferences resulting from
the combination of family model preferences with work centrality. All three
questions produced results in line with those obtained in Eurobarometer and
other surveys.
The family models question identifies home-centered women: those who
prefer to focus their time and energy on home and family work and, thus, seek
a marriage with complete role segregation. Slightly less than one fifth of the
sample fell into this category.
The two questions on work orientations identify people for whom market
work is central to identity and lifestyle. The question on work commitment
identifies people who claim they would continue with paid work (not necessarily
in the same job) in the absence of economic necessity. The introduction
of a national lottery in Britain in the 1990s made this hypothetical situation
more realistic than previously. The lottery proved enormously popular, and
there is substantial publicity for the millionaires it regularly creates, all of
whom give up their usual job soon afterwards. Responses to the question are
clearly biased by a certain degree of political correctness, as almost two
thirds of men and women claimed they would continue in paid work, including
those aged 65 and older who were already retired.
Primary and secondary earners were identified by a question asking about
the main income earner(s) in the household. People who classified themselves
as sole or joint main earner(s) were classified as primary earners; all
others were classified as secondary earners. The question was treated as an
opinion question, and analyses of responses show clearly that that is what it
is. For example, married men adopt the identity of primary (co)earner irrespective
of income level and even when they are not in employment. In contrast,
women who regard themselves as primary earners when single switch
immediately to the secondary earner identity (or even complete dependence)
440 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
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after marriage, almost irrespective of their income level. Work centrality is
defined as a combination of adopting a primary earner identity and having
nonfinancial commitment to one’s paid work. For married women, this
means in practice those who regard themselves as joint main earner and are
committed to their employment activities. Less than one fifth of married
women passed this test, and overall only one quarter of women compared to
half of all men were classified as work-centered.13
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 441
TABLE 4: The Identification of Lifestyle Preferences (in percentages)
Women Men All
1. People talk about the changing roles of husband and wife
in the family. Here are three kinds of family. Which of them
corresponds best with your ideas about the family?
a
• A family where the two partners each have an equally
demanding job and where housework and the care of
the children are shared equally between them. 42 46 44
• A family where the wife has a less demanding job than
her husband and where she does the larger share of
housework and caring for the children. 42 35 39
• A family where only the husband has a job and the wife
runs the home. 17 19 18
• None of these three cases
2. If without having to work you had what you would regard
as a reasonable living income, would you still prefer to
have a paid job, or wouldn’t you bother?
b
Would still work 58 62 60
3. Who is the main income-earner in your household?
Is it yourself? 33 69 50
Your partner/spouse? 46 6 27
Both of you jointly? 10 12 11
Or someone else? 11 14 12
Work centrality:
Work-centered 26 52 38
Other reasons for work 74 48 62
Lifestyle preferences:
Home-centered 17 ?
Adaptive 69 <48
Work-centered 14 52
Base = 100% n = n = N =
1,960 1,691 3,651
a. Tiny numbers of respondents saying “don’t know” or rejecting all three family models
are excluded from all analyses of Question 1.For half the sample, the order of the three
models in Question 1 was reversed.
b. Tiny numbers of people giving a “don’t know” response to Question 2 are grouped
with those who would give up work.
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The final variable, lifestyle preferences, works well for women because of
the way the survey questions were focused on women’s choices but works
poorly for men. Work-centered women are identified as those who prefer the
egalitarian model of the family and are work-centered. Less than one fifth of
women in Britain are work-centered, compared to half of all men. Most
women (69%) are classified as adaptive. This group comprises those choosing
the compromise model of the family with women as secondary earners,
plus those choosing the egalitarian model, with symmetrical roles, who do
not pass the work-centrality test. Men’s lifestyle preferences are less well
defined because all three family models involve full-time permanent incomeearning
roles for men, so home-centered men, who would anyway constitute
a tiny minority, cannot be identified. Because the question on family models
does not differentiate between men, the work-centrality index alone was used
toseparate work-centeredmen fromtheadaptiveandhome-centeredgroups.
The distribution of lifestyle preferences among all adults (Table 4) and
women of working age (Table 5) is very close to that predicted by preference
theory for women (Hakim, 2000b, p. 6) and for men (Hakim, 2000b, p. 255).
The distribution for women varies according to the population base. For
example, among wives and cohabitees aged 20 to 59, the distribution
becomes 13% home-centered, 77% adaptive, and only 10% work-centered.
Among men, the distribution does not vary between subgroups.
In line with preference theory, Table 5 shows that lifestyle choices differ
very substantially between the three preference groups. Two thirds of work-
442 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
TABLE 5: Characteristics of Women in the Three Lifestyle Preference Groups
Home- WorkCentered
Adaptive Centered
% employed
Full-time 40 35 63
Part-time 16 37 15
% not in employment 44 28 22
% married/cohabiting 71 80 45
Average number of dependent children
aged 0 to 16 at home 1.28 1.02 0.61
% left full-time education
By age 16 55 56 42
17 to 21 years 33 32 40
Age 22+ 12 12 19
Base = 100% n = 171 n = 870 n = 194
National distribution of the three groups 14% 70% 16%
NOTE:The sample consists of women aged 20 to 59 who have completed their full-time
education. The fertility indicator is shown for women aged 20 to 55 years.
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centered women are in full-time employment. In contrast, two thirds of adaptive
women work part-time or not at all. Almost half of the home-centered
women are not in employment, and a small minority have never had a job. A
relatively high 40% of home-centered women have full-time jobs. The reasons
for this unexpected result are explored in the full report and show that in
certain circumstances, social constraints and economic factors can override
personal preferences (Hakim, in press, chaps. 5 and 8).
Home-centered and adaptive women are most likely to marry or cohabit
and to stay married. This is not surprising, as their preferred lifestyle is
heavily dependent on having a breadwinner spouse who is in regular employment.
Work-centered women are least likely to marry and most likely to be
separated or divorced. Women who regard themselves as financially independent
anyway have less motive to marry and to stay married. Finally,
home-centered women have twice as many children as work-centered
women, many of whom seem to be childless. The fertility measure here is
simple: the average number of children aged 0 to 16 living at home per
woman aged 20 to 55. It does not include older children (who may no longer
live at home anyway), so it understates total fertility. Nonetheless, it shows
clearly that fertility levels vary dramatically between the three preference
groups, along with marriage rates and employment patterns.
Educational standards differ between the three preference groups, but not
by enormous amounts. Work-centered women are slightly more likely to
have higher education: 19% compared to 12% in the other two groups. The
difference is small enough to be explained by differential self-selection into
higher education. These results undermine, and even overturn, human capital
theory: Educational differences between the three lifestyle groups are far too
small to justify the thesis that education is normally undertaken as an investment
in future careers. This may be true for most men, but it is not true for
women. As predicted by preference theory, lifestyle preferences cut across
education groups.
Overall, all the key features of the three preference groups are in line with
preference theory. In broad terms, preferences predict outcomes. The next
two sections consider whether preferences predict choices at a more detailed
level: the decision to work full-time and the choice of occupation.
PREFERENCES AND EMPLOYMENT DECISIONS
The NLS results in Table 1 demonstrate that a single, well-defined variable
can have an enormous impact as a determinant of female employment.
The NLS data on long-term life goals are loosely equivalent to the 1999
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 443
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British survey data on lifestyle preferences. Two quite different variables, but
still only two, in Table 6 display an even greater impact as determinants of
women’s full-time work rates. Family model preferences and work centrality
together raise full-time work rates from a low of 21% among women who
prefer differentiated family roles and for whom market work is not central to
72% among women who are work-centered and who prefer symmetrical
family roles. Work centrality and family role preferences both have a substantial
impact on work rates, doubling them among women. There is no
impact among men, because all three family models allocate a breadwinner
role to them and because the dependent husband in a role-reversal marriage is
as yet too rare for this to be a genuine choice for men. McRae (1986) has
shown that couples have problems even if the wife’s occupation is higher status
than the husband’s, when he is working.
Preferences predict work rates, but (full-time) employment does not predict
women’s preferences and values. That is, attitudes are not simply a rationalization
of employment decisions already made. The causal impact is one
way only.
Lifestyle preferences cut across socioeconomic groups, income levels,
and educational levels among men and, with small exceptions, among
women. Social, economic, and cultural capital are not important as correlates
or predictors of lifestyle preferences.
The impact of lifestyle preferences on employment is separate from and
stronger than the impact of education. One of the most often-repeated conclusions
in social research is that women with higher education qualifications
have higher work rates (in Britain, higher full-time work rates) than women
with only secondary school (high school) education. This pattern is repeated
in our survey, with a 20-percentage-point difference in full-time work rates
444 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
TABLE 6: Impact of Ideal Family Model and Work Centrality on Full-Time Work
Rates Among Couples (in percentages)
Ideal Family Model
Symmetrical Differentiated
Roles Roles All
All wives aged 20-59 53 26 36
Work-centered 72 60 67
All others 47 21 30
All husbands aged 20-59 80 87 84
Work-centered 79 89 84
All others 81 85 83
NOTE:The sample consists of married and cohabiting couples aged 20 to 59 who have
completed their full-time education.
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between women with higher education and other women (see Table 7).
Because education has an impact on social and political attitudes (Davis,
1982), it is usually assumed that it must have a major impact also on gender
ideology and lifestyle preferences. There is evidence in our survey that educational
level has a major impact on gender ideology, in particular the rejection
of patriarchal values. However, educational level has very little impact
on women’s lifestyle preferences (see Table 7). Highly educated women are
just as likely as others to prefer a marriage with completely separate roles
(14%). The only difference between the two educational groups is that there
is a slightly higher proportion of work-centered women among the highly
educated, 22% compared to 14%, a difference small enough to be the result of
differential self-selection into higher education. This means that most
women who enter higher education are not “investing” in a future employment
career, as human capital theory assumes, but in the marriage market.
Despite the fact that higher education has no important impact on lifestyle
preferences, Table 7 shows that lifestyle preferences have a huge impact
on full-time work rates, particularly among the more highly educated
women. A work-centered woman who does not have higher education qualifications
is more likely to be in full-time work than a highly educated woman
who is adaptive or home-centered. Among the highly educated, there is a
36-percentage-point difference between the work rates of adaptive and workcentered
women, a far larger gap than the 20-percentage-point difference
between the two education groups. Women with higher education tend to
marry spouses with similar education and high incomes. They are thus even
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 445
TABLE 7: The Relative Importance of Lifestyle Preferences and Education
(in percentages)
Working Full-Time Distribution
Highly Other Highly Other
Qualified Women Qualified Women
Lifestyle preferences:
Work-centered 82 56 22 14
Adaptive 46 32 64 72
Home-centered 54 37 14 14
All women aged 20-59 56 36 100 100
Base = 100% n = 245 n = 1,008 n = 245 n = 1,008
NOTE:The sample consists of women aged 20 to 59 who have completed their full-time
education. In the absence of information on educational qualifications, the highly qualified
are defined as those completing their full-time education at age 21 and later, because
in Britain, first degrees are normally completed by age 21.People completing fulltime
education at age 20 or earlier are assumed to have qualifications below tertiary education
level.
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better able to make choices uninhibited by financial constraints. In sum, lifestyle
preferences are more important than any impact of education.
Table 8 summarizes the results and shows the relative importance of practical
constraints, such as parental responsibilities versus lifestyle preferences,
as determinants of female full-time work rates.14
The aim in Table 8 is
to identify the factors that collectively push wives’full-time work rates up to
the same level as husbands’ full-time work rates or that depress their work
rates down to nothing. For illustrative purposes, the exercise is repeated for
all men and women aged 20 to 59. However, this exercise is theoretically less
meaningful. Women’s attitudes and values predate, and anticipate, marriage
and childbearing, but women only make hard choices between a career and a
family-centered life if, and when, they actually marry and have children. We
already know that higher education raises work rates, so the analysis focuses
on nongraduates, who make up the vast majority. Table 8 shows that a combination
of lifestyle preferences and just two contextual factors can push
women’s work rates up to 100% or down to 0% among nongraduate wives.
Results are a little weaker for all women aged 20 to 59 (graduates and
nongraduates combined).
A work-centered lifestyle preference roughly doubles nongraduate wives’
full-time work rates as noted earlier. In contrast, patriarchal values have very
little impact, and child care responsibilities have no impact at all on work
rates among work-centered women. Having a mortgage to pay off has a substantial
impact, raising work rates from 72% to 100%. The reasons for this are
discussed in the full report (Hakim, in press, chaps. 5 and 8) but include selection
effects as well as motivational factors. The attractions of home
446 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
TABLE 8: Ideological Influences on Full-Time Work Rates Among Nongraduates
(in percentages)
Impact of Selection Factors Added
in Ascending/Descending Order Wives Husbands Women Men
+4 has a mortgage to pay off 100 83 88 87
+3 not a parent of child(ren) aged <17 72 77 72 80
+2 rejects patriarchal values 72 82 62 83
+1 work-centered lifestyle preference 64 76 56 76
Full-time work rates: all aged 20-59 32 84 36 80
+1 home-centered lifestyle preference 31 74 37 65
+2 parent of child(ren) aged 0-16 9 76 10 71
+3 in public rented housing 0 43 7 41
NOTE:Sample consists of people aged 20 to 59 who completed their full-time education
before the age of 21 and are not currently studying and are almost certainly
nongraduates.
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ownership, and the financial burdens of associated mortgages, have had a significant
impact in raising wives’ employment in recent decades in Britain.
It appears that lifestyle preferences may raise work rates but do not always
depress them. Full-time work rates among home-centered women are no
lower than average, although they are lower for adaptive women. Children,
however, have a large impact, depressing work rates from 31% to 9% among
home-centered nongraduate women, with a weaker impact on adaptive
women, depressing full-time work rates to 17%. Housing has only a tiny
impact: Living in public rented housing depresses work rates a little further
from 9% to 0% among home-centered women, but it has no impact at all on
adaptive women. It appears that lifestyle preferences determine which social
and economic contextual factors women respond to.
These results corroborate the NLS results for the United States reviewed
earlier and summarized in Table 1. Wives who work only if their child care
responsibilities allow them to do so are in effect fulfilling a prior choice of
emphasis on homemaking as life’s central activity. Child care responsibilities
have little or no impact on the employment of work-centered women. Similarly,
housing can have a major or minor impact depending on which lifestyle
preference group is looked at. These results demonstrate how any particular
factor can be shown to be important, or unimportant, when case study projects
focus narrowly on one or another group of women. The heterogeneity of
women’s lifestyle preferences renders it impossible to produce universally
valid statements about which social factors determine female work rates. It is
essentialtodifferentiatebetweenthethreepreferencegroupsamong women.
Ideology has no impact on men’s full-time work rates. Parental responsibilities
also have no effect, because men’s role in most families is primarily
that of income earner, not carer. Table 8 confirms the lack of genuine choices
inmen’slivesas compared withwomen’slivesinBritaininthe21stcentury.
PREFERENCES AND OCCUPATIONAL CHOICE
The lifestyle preference taxonomy can also be used to test other theories
that refer to women’s aspirations, motivations, or values as determinants of
their behavior. Just one example is Polachek’s well-known thesis explaining
occupational segregation with reference to the different work orientations
and employment patterns of primary and secondary earners.
The essential thesis is that married women (who mostly regard themselves
as secondary earners) choose occupations that are compatible with family
work, such as (in the United States) occupations that can be done intermittently
or (in Britain) occupations that can be done on a part-time basis. The
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thesis builds on the observation that certain occupations, such as teaching and
secretarial work, employ women almost exclusively, not only in Europe but
across the whole world (Anker, 1998, pp. 252-264). Teaching is an ideal
family-friendly occupation because it allows mothers to be at home with their
children during school holidays, including the long summer holiday. Secretarial
work has the advantage of offering plenty of part-time and temporary
jobs, with few or no penalties from taking a career break.
This thesis, well grounded in empirical observation, was converted into a
somewhat different thesis when it was operationalized and tested by
Polachek (1975, 1979, 1981, 1995; Goldin & Polachek 1987), and other
social scientists, notably England (1982, 1984). Polachek has argued that few
jobs in professional and managerial occupations but most jobs in clerical,
sales, and unskilled occupations tolerate intermittent or part-time employment.
Those that do attract large numbers of women. Hence, women are generally
concentrated in lower grade and lower paid occupations whereas men
are concentrated in the more demanding professional and managerial occupations,
which must be pursued on a continuous, full-time basis. The attraction
of his thesis is that it provides a combined explanation for horizontal
occupational segregation (why men and women do different types of work)
and for vertical occupational segregation (why men are concentrated in
higher grade occupations whereas women are concentrated in lower grade
occupations) and, thus, for the pay gap as well as occupational segregation.
However, Polachek operationalized the thesis into a statement that married
women maximize their earnings, or minimize the wage depreciation resulting
from a career break, by choosing occupations that tolerate discontinuous
work histories. England stretched the thesis even further into the idea that all
women in all female-dominated occupations experience lower wage depreciation
after a career break than women in all male-dominated occupations.
These reformulations offer the advantage of earnings, or earnings depreciation,
being the measure of an occupation’s family-friendly advantages. Using
these reformulations, arguably distortions of the original idea, research
results have been mixed. Polachek’s studies based on national U.S. data sets
for the 1960s and 1970s confirm the thesis, whereas England’s studies based
on the same or similar U.S. data refute the thesis. This is not surprising. The
advantages of family-friendly occupations are not necessarily tied to earnings
maximization. Earnings are often traded off against other convenience
factors (Gallie, White, Cheng, & Tomlinson, 1998, pp. 195-205). Teaching is
attractive to mothers because the annual timetable fits in with their own children’s
school (and university) timetable, not because it pays more than other
occupations or pays the same after a domestic break. In effect, the thesis was
448 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
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distorted to test it with earnings data as the sole measure of an occupation’s
attractiveness to wives and mothers (Hakim, 2000b, pp. 38-39).
A quite different approach to explaining occupational segregation argues
that it is man-made: artificially created by systematic sex discrimination by
employers who invariably favor men for jobs and only hire women when the
supply of men is inadequate, so that men are always first in the queue for the
best jobs (Reskin & Roos, 1990).15
Paradoxically, this thesis, and a related
stream of research, gained popularity after the equal opportunities revolution
that outlawed any overt or covert sex discrimination when selecting people
for jobs or for promotion to higher grades. Reskin and Roos (1990) supported
their “job queuing” thesis with 11 case studies of occupations that feminized
rapidly over the period from 1970 and 1988 in the United States. Unfortunately,
as the authors themselves admitted, their research evidence is equally
consistent with the opposite of their preferred interpretation: that men chase
money, power, and status harder than women, so that any highly paid or highstatus
occupation becomes male-dominated, whereas occupations with falling
wages or status cease to attract men and become female-dominated
(Hakim, 1998, pp. 64-65). For example Reskin and Roos showed that all the
feminizing occupations they studied offered the alternative advantages of
flexibility in hours worked and part-time/part-year work, options that were of
no interest to men but of substantial value to women.
In what follows, I test Polachek’s original thesis without focusing exclusively
on earnings. Instead, I assess whether sex-role ideology and work orientations
determine women’s choice of occupation. More specifically, I test
whether women who favor the compromise arrangement, who regard themselves
as secondary earners, are more likely to choose female-dominated
occupations rather than male-dominated occupations.
There is an extensive literature on the advantages and disadvantages of
various measures of occupational segregation. A vast majority of these are
single-number indices, such as the Dissimilarity Index, that are popular for
comparisons across societies and for studying trends over time (Anker, 1998;
Hakim, 1992, 1998; Melkas & Anker, 1997, 1998). However, single-number
indices are no use to my purposes here, as my goal is to examine the particular
types of occupation chosen by different groups of women. Instead, I use the
threefold classification of occupations developed by Hakim (1993; 1996, p.
159; 1998) and since used by some other researchers (Blackwell, 2001). The
new approach identifies a separate category of integrated or mixed occupations
straddling the dividing line between the two dominant categories of
male-dominated and female-dominated occupations. Mixed occupations are
defined statistically as those with sex ratios close to the average for the
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 449
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workforce as a whole in any given year. By 1999, women formed 45% of the
workforce in Britain, so mixed (or integrated) occupations are defined as
those with 30% to 60% female workers (45% ± 15%). Do women who prefer
to give priority to their homemaker role, or who seek an even balance
between paid work and family work, choose particular kinds of occupation?
Surprisingly, the answer from the 1999 British survey is a resounding no.
Contrary to Polachek’s thesis, women’s ideal family model does not determine
occupational choice in Britain at the start of the 21st century. This result
was so unexpected that the finding was thoroughly tested using different population
bases and age groups and different versions of the occupational segregation
classification. Altogether, four versions of the occupational typology
were applied. Integrated occupations were variously defined as those 15% to
45% (30% ± 15%), 25% to 55% (40% ± 15%), 30% to 60% (45% ± 15%), and
30% to 70% (50% ± 20%) female. The results were always similar to those
presented in Table 9 for people in employment. This finding is not sensitive to
the particular typology applied and is robust.16
The preferred family model has no important and systematic impact on
the occupational choices of men and women, and there are only small variations
around the averages for all men and all women of working age (Table 9).
Similarly, the type of occupation chosen does not predict or determine the
preferred model of marital roles, with relatively small and nonsystematic
variations around the average for all persons. There is a small tendency for
people in sex-atypical occupations to have more extreme views, but both
these groups are small. Because people aged 65 and older are excluded from
Table 9, the proportions choosing the role-segregated model are somewhat
smaller than when the entire population is included.
Similarly, there is no strong and systematic association between women’s,
or wives’, lifestyle preferences and occupational choice (Table 10). Adaptive
women are slightly more likely to choose female occupations. Workcentered
women are slightly more likely to choose male occupations, but
then, so are home-centered women. None of these associations are strong.
Lifestyle preferences do not determine occupational choice today, as
Polachek concluded for the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, but they do
determine choice of job.17
Women’s full-time work rates are systematically
high among work-centered women, no matter what type of occupation they
are in. Full-time work rates are much lower among adaptive and homecentered
women, especially if they are in female occupations, where parttime
jobs are widely available. Male occupations have almost no part-time
jobs, so full-time employment is dominant; however, lifestyle preferences
still have an impact, raising full-time work rates from 45% among home-centered
women to 75% among work-centered women (Table 10). This is a
450 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
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classic illustration of the joint impact of social structural factors (such as the
paucity or abundance of part-time jobs in an occupation) and of lifestyle preferences,
which go unmeasured in most surveys.
The sex segregation of occupations cannot be explained today with reference
to the different family roles of men and women. Possibly family roles
were never in fact important, even if the rhetoric that built up around masculine
and feminine occupations and work cultures often referred to family
roles as well as to “essentialist” arguments about jobs suitable for men or for
women (Hakim, 1996, pp. 162-166). Explanations for the sex segregation of
occupations will have to rely instead on benign social processes, such as the
tendency for people to choose same-sex friends and hence also to prefer
same-sex work groups (Hakim, 1996, pp. 162-166; 1998, pp. 56-59).18
Adaptive women can now accommodate their paid work to their family
priorities by choosing part-time jobs or by moving in and out of the labor
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 451
TABLE 9: Occupational Segregation by Ideal Family Model
Ideal Family Model
Type of Role
Occupation Egalitarian Compromise Segregation Base = 100%
Men
Male-dominated 47 41 12 717
Mixed 49 32 19 160
Female-dominated 64 26 11 144
All 49 38 13 1,022
Women
Male-dominated 53 30 17 128
Mixed 45 48 7 174
Female-dominated 46 43 11 696
All 47 42 11 997
Men
Male-dominated 66 77 66 70
Mixed 16 13 22 16
Female-dominated 18 10 12 14
Total 100 100 100 100
Women
Male-dominated 14 9 20 13
Mixed 17 20 11 17
Female-dominated 69 71 69 70
Total 100 100 100 100
NOTE: Row percentages are shown in the top section and column percentages in the
bottom section.The sample consists of people currently in work of working age (16 to 65
years).
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market at different stages of their lives. Women who regard themselves as
secondary earners are most likely to work in female-dominated occupations,
where part-time jobs are plentiful and high labor turnover is tolerated. At this
point, cause and effect must be disentangled with care. In line with preference
theory and research evidence on how women choose their identity as primary
or secondary earner, it can be concluded that women who prefer to give priority
to their family work, in whole or in part, currently gravitate toward the
female-dominated occupations because they offer plenty of part-time jobs
and tolerate high turnover rates. However, male-dominated and mixed occupations
are gradually increasing their share of part-time and temporary jobs
452 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
TABLE 10: Occupational Choice by Lifestyle Preferences
Home- WorkType
of Occupation Centered Adaptive Centered All
All women aged 20 to 59 (column %)
Male 21 10 17 12
Mixed 12 18 22 18
Female 67 72 61 70
All 100 100 100 100
All women aged 20 to 59 (row %)
Male 22 56 22 100
Mixed 9 72 19 100
Female 13 73 14 100
All 13 71 16 100
Wives aged 20 to 59 (column %)
Male 22 9 15 12
Mixed 12 19 23 18
Female 66 72 62 70
All 100 100 100 100
Wives aged 20 to 59 (row %)
Male 24 63 13 100
Mixed 8 80 12 100
Female 12 79 9 100
All 13 78 10 100
% currently working full-time among
wives aged 20 to 59
Male 45 64 75 60
Mixed 58 49 71 52
Female 30 25 73 29
All 37 33 73 37
NOTE: The sample consists of all women aged 20 to 59, then married and cohabiting
women aged 20 to 59, excluding students and people who have never worked. Coding
of type of occupation is based on previous occupations of those not in work and current
occupations of those in employment.
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as well, so that the dividing line between them is getting fainter rather than
stronger over time.
These results are testimony to the impact of equal opportunities laws and
policies on employers in Britain. Whatever their ambitions and life plans,
women can now choose occupations far more freely than in the past. As parttime
jobs and other forms of family-friendly flexibility gradually spread into
jobs in all occupations, employers will find that they have a combination of
primary and secondary earners working side by side in all types of occupation.
This new type of employee diversity will pose challenges for human
resource management in both the private and public sectors.
CONCLUSIONS
Preference theory builds on the pathbreaking results of the early American
longitudinal studies, which showed just how important life goals and
aspirations could be in the long term. Preference theory posits that these
motivations only became powerful after the contraceptive revolution and the
equal opportunities revolution gave women genuine choices as to the relative
balance between market work and family work in their lives. Preference theory
constitutes a major break from the teleological theories implicit in the
expectation that male and female employment patterns will converge and that
sex differentials will disappear in the workforce.
Although the theory is empirically based, the 1999 British survey is the
first to attempt to operationalize and test it with freshly collected data. The
survey showed that three questions can be sufficient to identify and differentiate
home-centered, adaptive, and work-centered women. The resulting taxonomy
worked well, displaying sharp differences between the three groups
in terms of employment patterns and marital and fertility histories.
There is still scope for the three questions to be developed and refined. For
example, the question on ideal family models might be extended to include
role-reversal models. This would permit the lifestyle preferences of men to
be identified more completely. Second, questions on work centrality might
need modification for other cultural settings and to avoid the political correctness
bias that gradually affects all survey questions on work orientations.
In sum, preference theory can be operationalized with a limited number of
tried-and-tested survey questions that are sufficiently simple and selfexplanatory
to be included in any large-scale survey exercise using structured
interviews. The excuse that attitudes and motivations are too difficult to measure
easily and reliably no longer holds water. Large batteries of questions are
not needed, even though social psychologists usually insist on them.
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 453
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Preference theory does not deny the impact of social, economic, and institutional
factors. These will continue to ensure no convergence of female
employment patterns in societies, such as Britain and the United States, that
have achieved the new scenario for women. However, the social environment
is no more than that. Women’s motivations and aspirations are independent
factors with causal powers that must now be investigated more thoroughly.
Preference theory brings values back into the multidisciplinary investigation
of future developments in female labor force participation.
Our analyses show that lifestyle preferences have a powerful impact on
women’s employment decisions and on the type of job chosen, but not, as
Polachek predicted, on women’s choice of occupation. Equal opportunities
legislation has been effective: Women are no longer excluded from certain
occupations because they are (assumed to be) not as work-centered as men.
But it does not mean that all women will behave exactly like men in the occupations
they share. Case studies of desegregated occupations, such as pharmacy,
in the United States, Britain, and Canada (Bottero, 1992; Crompton &
Le Feuvre, 1996; Hakim, 1998, pp. 221-234; Hassell, Noyce, & Jesson,
1998; Reskin & Roos, 1990, pp. 111-127; Tanner, Cockerill, Barnsley, &
Williams, 1999) show that women gravitate toward employee jobs with limited
responsibilities, part-time and short-term jobs, whereas men gravitate
toward self-employment and their own business or full-time jobs in large
retail chains offering the prospect of promotion into management. If this is
happening in occupations that require higher qualifications, it is even more
likely to happen in less qualified occupations. Too often, and too glibly, job
segregation within integrated occupations is interpreted as “resegregation”
forced on women by employers because researchers fail to collect information
on or address the substantively important variations in lifestyle preferences
among workers in a particular occupation.
Some will balk at these interpretations, particularly the emphasis on lifestyle
preferences as having causal powers. But at least these interpretations
are theoretically based, unlike the post hoc rationalization of all and any
research results by eclectic reference to human capital theory, institutional
theories, and anything else going. Preference theory produces predictions
that can be tested. In this analysis, all predictions have tested positive. In
addition, the theory can be used to test other, related hypotheses, such as
Polachek’s explanation for occupational segregation.
In sum, preference theory works in societies that have achieved the new
scenario for women. One of the benefits of this approach is that it forces a
long, hard look at the overall position of women in each society instead of
treating all Western European and North American countries as effectively
equivalent despite their differences. However, the main theoretical and
454 WORK AND OCCUPATIONS
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empirical development is the insistence that preferences and life goals can no
longer be ignored or assumed to be known or homogeneous.
NOTES
1. A fuller description of preference theory, and the empirical basis for it, is given in Hakim
(2000b).
2. Two versions of the question have been used in the National Longitudinal Surveys
(NLS). In the initial 1968 survey, respondents were asked, “Now I would like to talk to you about
your future plans. What would you like to be doing when you are 35 years old?” From 1969 on,
the question was modified to read, “Now I would like to talk to you about your future job plans.
What kind of work would you like to be doing when you are 35 years old?” In both versions,
keeping house or raising a family was a possible response.
3. The large new youth cohort initiated in 1979 showed that the new cohort of young women
entering the labor market in the 1980s had stronger work expectations and work commitment
than had previous cohorts. In 1979, young women were only half as likely as young women in
1968 to say they expected to be housewives not in the paid labor force at age 35, with only one
quarterplanningtobehousewives(Sproat,Churchill,&Sheets,1985,pp.76-78,318,335-336).
4. An even bigger U.S. study, the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of
1972 (NLS72) produced results that corroborate those of the NLS. It showed, for example, that
young women who subsequently became mothers before the age of 25 differed significantly
from those who remained childless: They were less work-oriented, were more likely to plan to be
homemakers at age 30, were less likely to plan a professional career, and held more traditional
sex-role attitudes and aspirations before they gave birth. Parenthood strengthens preexisting traditional
attitudes in both young White men and women (Morgan & Waite, 1987; Waite,
Haggstrom, & Kanouse, 1986). None of these results are acknowledged or reflected in recent
analyses of NLS72, which compare men’s and women’s occupational aspirations while ignoring
sex-role attitudes, to the point that women hoping to be full-time homemakers at age 30 are simply
excluded from analyses (Rindfuss, Cooksey, & Sutterlin, 1999).
5. Some studies have shown work commitment to have a much bigger impact among married
women than other social structural factors, especially when the husband’s attitudes are also
taken into account. Geerken and Gove (1983, p. 66) showed that these two factors produce a 50to-70-percentage-point
increase in economic activity rates of wives in the United States. A study
of Canadian working wives also found strong associations between work commitment, higher
status jobs, and the husband’s support for his wife’s employment (Chappell, 1980).
6. For example, recent NLS analyses continue to treat child care responsibilities as a key determinant
of women’s labor force participation, as illustrated by Charles et al. (2001).
7. Within Europe, the Netherlands may be the only other country that had achieved the new
scenario by the year 2000. Sweden has so far failed to implement the last two conditions, so genuine
choices are still not a reality in that country.
8. The distribution of women across the three groups corresponds to a “normal” distribution
of responses to the family-work conflict.
9. For example, in Greece, Italy, and Spain, there is evidence of informal barriers to
women’s access to the labor market: Female unemployment rates are more than double male unemployment
rates, and there is some evidence of the disparity widening over time rather than
falling.
10. A full report on the 1999 British survey is given in Hakim (in press).
Hakim / LIFESTYLE PREFERENCES AND WOMEN’S CAREERS 455
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11. Tests of statistical significance are not reported in the analyses. These tests indicate
whether the sample size was large enough for a tiny percentage difference to be reliable. The
1999 British survey was large enough to produce reliable results. More important, this study is
only interested in large and substantively important differences between the three preference
groups, not in small but statistically significant differences that can be ignored. Too often, researchers
use tests of statistical significance as a substitute for addressing the substantive importance
of their results (Morrison & Henkel, 1970), which may be minimal.
12. The Eurobarometer series of surveys are run by the European Commission to inform European
Union policy making. They cover all EU member states and focus on social and political
attitudes.
13. The sex differential in work centrality stands in contrast to the absence of differences between
men and women in job values, for example (Tolbert & Moen, 1998). However, when the
list of job values is increased from just 5 to 14, sex differentials reappear again (Kirkpatrick
Johnson, 2001).
14. Some will argue that this analysis should be based on regression analysis instead, with
lots of controls. There is a tendency to perceive multivariate analysis as better for causal analysis,
but as Esser (1996), Hedström and Swedberg (1996), and Lieberson (1985, p. 155) have all
pointed out, it does not go beyond description and is in fact less illuminating on causal processes.
The excessive use of controls can be counterproductive. The initial zero-order association found
in cross-tabulation and correlation is often a closer approximation to the true association
(Lieberson, 1985, pp. 42, 120-151, 185-211).
15. A more extreme version of this thesis has been presented by Hartmann (1976) and Walby
(1986, 1990), who argued that occupational segregation is the primary mechanism for maintaining
patriarchy, that is, male dominance in public and private life. However, Hakim (2000b, p.
282) has criticized the thesis as unsupported by evidence from recent research on occupational
segregation and the pay gap. A historical analysis by Lerner (1986) showed that patriarchy developed
first and foremost through male control of female sexuality and female reproduction,
leading to an emphasis on the physical segregation of men and women, not on the sex segregation
of occupations per se.
16. This is generally true of all findings in this section. The particular typology of occupations
applied makes little or no difference to the results.
17. Similarly, Desai and Waite (1991) found no association between women’s lifestyle preferences
and occupational choice in the U.S. NLS data for young women. However, women who
prefer a full-time homemaker role are most responsive to job convenience factors such as flexible
working arrangements.
18. Kalmijn (2002) reviewed the many reasons offered for the dominance of same-sex
friendships, which occurs in childhood and adolescence as well as in adult life. He finds that
cross-sex friendships seem to demand greater social skills. No doubt this applies also to workplacerelationships,sothatsame-sexworkgroupsareregardedaseasierandmore
comfortable.
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