In the seventeenth-century Florentine textile industry, women were employed primarily inlow-paying, low-skill jobs. To explain this segregation of labor by gender, economists have reliedon the useful theory of human capital. According to this theory, investment in human capital-theacquisition of difficult job-related skills-generally benefits individuals by making them eligible toengage in well-paid occupations. Women’s role as child bearers, however, results in interruptionsin their participation in the job market (as compared with men’s) and thus reduces theiropportunities to acquire training for highly skilled work. In addition, the human capital theoryexplains why there was a high concentration of women workers in certain low-skill jobs, such asweaving, but not in others, such as combing or carding, by positing that because of their primaryresponsibility in child rearing women took occupations that could be carried out in the home.
There were, however, differences in pay scales that cannot be explained by the human capitaltheory. For example, male construction workers were paid significantly higher wage than femaletaffeta weavers. The wage difference between these two low-skill occupations stems from thesegregation 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 this “overcrowding” resulted in womenreceiving lower wages and men receiving higher wages.
The passage suggests that combing and carding differ from weaving in that combing and carding are______
A．low-skill jobs performed by primarily by women employees
B．low-skill jobs that were not perfomed 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