The joint effect of ethnicity and gender on occupational segregation. An approach based on the Mutual Information Index

Abstract

This article studies the effects of gender and ethnicity on occupational segregation. The traditional approach to this topic measures the two sources of segregation separately. In contrast, we measure the joint effect of gender and ethnicity by applying a multigroup segregation index-the Mutual Information or M index-to the product of the two genders and seven ethnic groups distinguished in our census data for England and Wales in 2001. We exploit M's strong group decomposability property to consistently pose the following two questions: (i) How much does each source contribute to occupational segregation, controlling for the effect of the other? (ii) Is the combined impact of gender and ethnicity greater than, equal to, or smaller than the sum of their individual effects? The main empirical findings are the following two. First, we confirm previous results showing the greater importance of gender over ethnicity as a source of occupational segregation. However, we find that ethnicity contributes 13.5 percent of overall segregation in geographical areas where minorities concentrate. Second, contrary to intersectionality theories, we find that there is a small, "dwindling" interaction effect between the two sources of segregation: ethnicity slightly weakens the segregative power of gender, and vice versa.

The Evolution of Gender Segregation over the Life Course

“…Equation 8 is the age-period-specific version of Expression 1. This approach is essentially similar to that followed in Guinea-Martin and colleagues (2015) to study the joint impact of ethnicity and gender on occupational segregation. 5…”

“…When the interaction term is positive, both occupation and time requirements work "in the same direction," so to speak. When the interaction is negative, these sources of segregation work "in opposite directions," such as when there is overrepresentation of women in either fulltime female-typed jobs or part-time maletyped jobs (for a discussion of the interaction term in the context of occupational segregation by ethnicity and gender, see Guinea-Martin, Mora, and Ruiz-Castillo 2015). The decomposition of the M index in Expression 1 summarizes our strategy: (1)…”

“… 5. Taking genders (or ethnic groups) as supergroups and applying the SD property for partitions of demographic groups into supergroups, Guinea-Martin and colleagues (2015) decompose occupational segregation measured by the M index into three terms: the effect of gender and ethnicity, controlling for the other, plus an interaction term—an analogous decomposition to the one we introduce in Equation 8. …”

The impact of occupational structures on ethnic and gendered employment gaps: An event history analysis using social security register data

“…Our closure measure reflects the extent to which occupations disperse over different credentials. We draw on the concept of mutual information [24,44], which in our case is the information obtained about the credential from knowing the occupation of a job seeker. Occupational closure can be expressed as a measure of local linkage.…”

Gender segregation and wage differentials in India: the role of educational attainment and occupational choices

“…In the conventional one-dimensional approach, the implicit assumption is that each variable generates segregation independently. Such measures may hide the true roles of variables when the variables interact in some way (Guinea-Mart ın et al, 2015).…”