In the seventeenth-century Florentine textile
industry, women were employed primarily in lowpaying,
low-skill jobs. To explain this segregation
of labor by gender, economists have relied on
(5) the useful theory of human capital. According
to this theory, investment in human capital- the
acquisition of difficult job-related skills-generally
benefits individuals by making them eligible to
engage in well-paid occupations. Women's role as
(10) child bearers, however, results in interruptions in
their participation in the job market (as compared
with men's) and thus reduces their opportunities
to acquire training for highly skilled work. In
addition, the human capital theory explains why
(15) there was a high concentration of women workers
in certain low-skill jobs, such as weaving, but not
in others, such as combing or carding, by positing
that because of their primary responsibility in child
rearing women took occupations that could be
(20) carried out in the home.
There were, however, differences in pay scales
that cannot be explained by the human capital
theory. For example, male construction workers
were paid significantly higher wages than female
(25) taffeta weavers. The wage difference between
these two low-skill occupations stems from the
segregation of labor by gender: because a limited
number of occupations were open to women, there
was a large supply of workers in their fields, and
(30) this "overcrowding" resulted in women receiving
lower wages and men receiving higher wages.

Questions 42-44 refer to the passage above.

42. The passage suggests that combing and carding differ
from weaving in that combing and carding were
(A) low-skill jobs performed primarily by women
employees
(B) low-skill jobs that were not performed in the
home
(C) low-skill jobs performed by both male and
female employees
(D) high-skill jobs performed outside the home
(E) high-skill jobs performed by both male and
female employees

43. Which of the following, if true, would most weaken the
explanation provided by the human capital theory for
women's concentration in certain occupations in
seventeenth-century Florence?
(A) Women were unlikely to work outside the home
even in occupations whose hours were flexible
enough to allow women to accommodate
domestic tasks as well as paid labor.
(B) Parents were less likely to teach occupational
skills to their daughters than they were to their
sons.
(C) Women's participation in the Florentine paid
labor force grew steadily throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
(D) The vast majority of female weavers in the
Florentine wool industry had children.
(E) Few women worked as weavers in the Florentine
silk industry, which was devoted to making
cloths that required a high degree of skill to
produce.

44. The author of the passage would be most likely to
describe the explanation provided by the human
capital theory for the high concentration of women in
certain occupations in the seventeenth-century
Florentine textile industry as
(A) well founded though incomplete
(B) difficult to articulate
(C) plausible but poorly substantiated
(D) seriously flawed
(E) contrary to recent research



OAs:

42. B
43. A
44. A