Summary This article examines the relationship between gender, forms of employment and dimensions of precarious employment in Canada, using data from the Labour Force Survey and the General Social Survey. Full-time permanent wage work decreased for both women and men between 1989 and 2001, but women remain more likely to be employed in part-time and temporary wage work as compared to men. Layering forms of wage work with indicators of regulatory protection, control and income results in a continuum with full-time permanent employees as the least precarious followed by full-time temporary, part-time permanent and then part-time temporary employees as the most precarious. The continuum is gendered through both inequalities between full-time permanent women and men and convergence in precariousness among part-time and temporary women and men. These findings reflect a feminization of employment norms characterized by both continuity and change in the social relations of gender.

Temporary employment, Gender, Immigration, Inequality,

'Precarious employment' is a better concept for understanding labour market insecurity than the dominant concept in Canada, 'non-standard work.' We examine dimensions of precariousness between and within mutually exclusive forms of employment. The growth of 'non-standard work' is fuelled by increases in forms of employment that lack regulatory protection, such as own- account self-employment. Wage work falls along a continuum of precariousness measured as regulatory protection, control and income. Finally, employment in precarious forms is shaped by social location. White men are concentrated in the least precarious forms of employment, while white women, women of colour and youth are concentrated in the more precarious forms.

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Using gender as its analytic lens, this article examines segmentation in the Canadian labour market by focusing on the standard employment relationship. It illustrates how standard employment was crafted upon a speii gender division of paid and unpaid labour, the male breadwinner norm, and was only available to a narrow segment of workers. To this end, it traces how from the lOSOs the standard employment relationship ws supelemanted by a growth in jobs associated with, and filed pnrimaly by, women workers and it shows how women's increasing labour market participation in the late 196Os and early 1970s shaped demands for equality in employment policies. Since the 1 9SOs, a deterioration in the standard employment relationship has undermined both demands for and the basis of gender equality strategies and the article concludes by raising the question of the normative basis for regulating employment in order to Move towards strategies for reregulation.