Trends in Occupational Segregation by Gender 1970-2009: Adjusting for the Impact of Changes in the Occupational Coding System

Abstract

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Examining occupational health and safety disparities using national data: A cause for continuing concern

“…A paper on occupational fatalities among women [Hoskins, 2005] hypothesizes that industrial and occupational segregation by sex partially explains differences in fatalities between the sexes. Some decreases have been seen in occupational segregation by gender in the last 40 years although the decreases have varied with education with the least change among high school dropouts and blue collar workers [Blau et al, 2013]. This should be examined further as more traditionally “male” jobs open to women and vice versa.…”

Gender Differences in the Formation of a Field of Study Choice Set

“…Moreover, the table clearly shows that first-choice majors at the Technion are more gender segregated than are second-choice majors ( D = .367) and that this difference is statistically significant. A difference of 0.434 and 0.367 is large enough to be of substantive importance; it equals the change in the index of dissimilarity measure for gender segregation of occupations in the U.S. labor force between 1980 and 2000 (Blau et al 2012) or the overall change in gender segregation in fields of study for BA recipients in the United States between the late 1980s and the present (Mann and DiPrete 2013). …”

Rising Intragenerational Occupational Mobility in the United States, 1969 to 2011

“…Finally, decreases in the segregation of men and women across occupations at the end of the twentieth century have uncertain implications for changes in mobility for both genders (Bielby and Baron 1986; Blau et al 2012; Jacobs 1989; Reskin 1993). On one hand, declining gender segregation suggests declining barriers to occupational mobility for women, and therefore increasing exchange mobility.…”

“…Instead, we have accumulated substantial knowledge about career mobility primarily through single or pooled cohort studies that investigate the life-course events, job progressions, promotions, and work disruptions that make up careers (Johnson and Mortimer 2002; Kronberg 2013; Sørensen 1974, 1975; Sørensen and Grusky 1996; Spilerman 1977; Wegener 1991) and identify individual, labor market, and industrial characteristics that shape diverse career trajectories (DiPrete 1993, 2002; Hachen 1992; Haveman and Cohen 1994). However, macro-economic changes—such as skill-biased technological change (Autor, Levy, and Murnane 2003), de-unionization (Western and Rosenfeld 2011), and precarious labor (Kalleberg 2009), as well as globalization, declining occupational gender segregation (Blau, Brummund, and Liu 2012), rising educational attainments, and increasing female labor force participation—have substantially restructured the U.S. labor market since the 1970s. These changes suggest shifting rates of intragenerational mobility that are made visible only by zooming out from individual cohorts and considering the full labor force.…”