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Contrasting Perspectives On Women's Access To Prestigious Occupations, Roger Clark

Roger D. Clark

This paper identifies three theoretical perspectives on women's relative access to relatively prestigious, influential occupations: a modernization perspective, an economic discrimination perspective, and a dependency/world system perspective. It draws a set of contrasting hypotheses from these perspectives and tests them, through panel regression, with data from 57 nations. The empirical evidence offers support for the dependency/world system and the modernization views, but contradicts the economic discrimination perspective.