Data from 44 societies are used to explore sex segregation by field of study. Contrary to accounts linking socioeconomic modernization to a "degendering" of public-sphere institutions, sex typing of curricular fields is stronger in more economically developed contexts. The authors argue that two cultural forces combine in advanced industrial societies to create a new sort of sex segregation regime. The first is gender-essentialist ideology, which has proven to be extremely resilient even in the most liberal-egalitarian of contexts; the second is self-expressive value systems, which create opportunities and incentives for the expression of "gendered selves." Multivariate analyses suggest that structural features of postindustrial labor markets and modern educational systems support the cultivation, realization, and display of gender-specific curricular affinities.

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Around the globe and starting in the affluent West, women have made major, even revolutionary, strides toward equality with men. However, while access to major social institutions has equalized dramatically, expanded participation in labor markets and educational systems often comes in the form of gender-differentiated roles within these institutions. This article reviews international trends on different indicators of women's economic status and considers explanations for observed patterns. The forms of equality that tend to persist in advanced industrial societies are those that are readily interpreted as outcomes of free choices by formally equal but innately different men and women.

This article introduces a structural approach to analyzing sex segregation data that rests on margin-free measures of the underlying association in sex-by-occupation arrays. The starting point for the analyses is a log-multiplicative model that is formally consistent with the conventional practice of summarizing cross-national variability in a single parameter pertaining to the overall strength of sex segregation. Under this baseline specification, the segregation regime is forced to take on the same basic shape in each country, with the only form of permissible variability being a uniform compression or expansion of the peaks and valleys characterizing the shared segregation profile. Although the latter model does not account for the cross-national variability in our illustrative data, it can be readily generalized in ways that both improve the fit and yield new insights into the structure and sources of sex segregation. These elaborated models can be used to examine the hierarchical structure of segregation, to identify the dominant "segregation profiles" in industrial countries, and to parse out the net residue of segregation at multiple levels of analysis.The study of occupational sex segregation appears to be entering its takeoff period. This can be seen, for example, in the recent resurgence of interest in describing how the structure of sex segregation varies across Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the American