The purpose in this paper is to bring together a set of arguments about the general significance of service-sector employment in advanced industrial economies, the consequences of feminisation and casualisation for the occupational structure in these societies, particularly in ‘global’ cities, and the changing nature of gender divisions of labour. After a general outline of the changing distribution of work, the example of financial services, which are of enormous significance in global cities such as London, will be taken to investigate the consequences of the coincidence of these changes for employees in professional occupations. The particular empirical illustration of the arguments is an analysis of the social division of labour in merchant banks in the City of London in the early 1990s.
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