social democratic model might justify the high degree of sex segregation in Scandinavia
on the grounds that Scandinavian men and women are different but equal, because their
compressed wage structure produces the narrowest gender wage gap among advanced
industrial countries despite their highly sex segregated labor force. Are women really
equal when men occupy positions of authority in the economic realm? Or are women
fundamentally different from men in what they pursue in life that gender equality
necessarily means sex segregation as a result of free will? Or do institutional factors
constrain their choices? The fact that advanced industrial societies display different
patterns of sex segregation provides a fertile ground to empirically explore these
important normative questions.
This paper thus seeks to explain cross-national patterns of occupational sex
segregation. While the paper has been inspired by the Scandinavian puzzle, it is
concerned with cross-national variations of sex segregation among advanced industrial
societies more broadly. To this end, it develops an institutional theory of occupational
sex segregation that focuses on different national skill regimes. The central claim of the
paper is a novel one: institutions that promote specific skill investments produce
unintended gender biases. To put it differently, institutions associated with the so-called
coordinated market economies (CMEs) are more sex-segregating than those associated
with liberal market economies (LMEs). The paper provides a micro-level logic of skill
investment to identify the mechanism of gender bias of specific skills and, by extension,
institutions supportive of such investments. Our Scandinavian puzzle, this paper argues,
can be attributed to the nature of labor market institutions in Scandinavia—Scandinavian
2
Convention