Distinctive features of culture industries suggest that women culture workers face formidable barriers to career advancement. Using longitudinal data on the careers of screenwriters, we examine gender inequality in the labor market for writers of feature films. We hypothesize and test three different models of labor market dynamics and find support for a model of cumulative disadvantage whereby the gender gap in earnings grows as men and women move through their careers. We suggest that the transition of screenwriting from a mixed to a male-dominated occupation parallels the "empty field" phenomenon described in a study by Tuchman of nineteenth-century novelists. The institutionalization of male dominance of the film industry in the 1930s and the typecasting of women writers has had a lasting impact on gender inequality, which shows little change through the early 1990s.

We examine how organizations that mediate 'life-of-project' employment segment the labor market in a culture industry. Using longitudinal data on writers for television and feature films, we examine trends in the extent to which type of agency representation affects writers' employment and earnings. Elite or 'core' agencies are those that transcend their role as market brokers between the suppliers and purchasers of writing services by participating actively in the production process. Writers who are represented by such agencies are substantially more likely to find employment, and they earn considerably more than equally accomplished writers with noncore agency representation. We discuss the implications of these findings for contingent employment of professionalized employees in other highly institutionalized industrial sectors.

In this research, we analyze quantitative longitudinal data on the careers of 8,990 television and film writers to assess whether barriers to career success for older writers have increased in recent years. We detect a substantial shift in age-earnings profiles in favor of younger television writers during an era when programming strategies increasingly targeted younger audiences. We argue that marketing strategies in television that emphasize audience demographics and distinctive features of the business context encourage "typecasting" that creates barriers to career success for older writers. © 2001 Broadcast Education Association.

This article uses longitudinal career history data for the period 1982 through 1990 to explore the mechanisms that produce a gender gap in earnings among writers in the television industry. Two models of labor market dynamics are compared. The first is a model of cumulative disadvantage whereby differential access to opportunity is increasingly consequential over the course of writers' careers. The second is a model of continuous disadvantage whereby the contributions of women writers are uniformly devalued across career stages. The results strongly support the model of continuous disadvantage and show that a narrowing of the wage gap is limited to very recent cohorts of writers. The article describes how unstructured labor market arrangements in the entertainment industry sustain the process of continuous disadvantage and discusses implications for labor market issues more generally.

Tests competing explanations for why wives in dual-earner couples are less willing than husbands to relocate for a better job. Hypotheses are derived from a neoclassical market model. Results from a maximum-likelihood probit model that uses data from the 1977 Quality of Employment Survey indicate that couples' orientation to the "provider role' shapes how they respond to job opportunities. A husband's potential loss from a move appears to deter wives from capitalizing on opportunities at a new location, but a wife's potential loss does not deter husbands. Differences by gender are substantially smaller among men and women who reject traditional notions about husbands' and wives' roles within families. Implications for future theoretical development and empirical research are discussed. -from Authors