The purpose of this article is to analyse the relationship between the proportion of women working in an occupation and the prestige assigned to that occupation. Based on a representative sample of Spanish employees from the Spanish Quality of Work Life Survey, pooled-sample data (2007-2010) are used to show that occupations with larger shares of women present lower prestige, controlling for a set of objective individual and work-related variables, and self-assessed indicators of working conditions. Save for the male-dominated occupations (less than 20% women), the relationship between female share and occupational prestige is linear and negative, providing partial support to the devaluation theory. The results hold even after passing a battery of robustness checks.
This paper explores the role of over-education in shaping the negative relationship between the education level attained by employees and the fact of working in a gender-dominated occupation, in Spain, a country where the phenomenon of over-education is common. Applying multinomial logit regressions, and controlling for individual and job characteristics, the results confirm the typical finding that having a university degree decreases the odds of working in a genderdominated occupation. However, this is only true in the case of women when considering long-more than three years-university studies. The evidence also suggests that the general spread of over-education in Spain weakens that relationship so that reducing over-education would eventually lead to more uniformity in the gender-distribution of employment across occupations.
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