Occupational segregation is the distribution
of workers across and within occupations,
based upon demographic characteristics, most
often gender. Occupational segregation levels
differ on a basis of perfect segregation and
integration. Perfect segregation occurs where
any given occupation employs only one group.
Perfect integration, on the other hand, occurs
where each group holds the same proportion
of positions in an occupation as it holds
in the labor force.Many scholars, such as
Biblarz et al., argue that occupational segregation
is most likely caused by gender-based discrimination
that often occurs in patterns, either horizontally
(across occupations) or vertically (within
the hierarchy of occupations). Both of these
contribute to the gender pay gap.
== Types ==
=== Horizontal ===
Horizontal segregation refers to differences
in the number of people of each gender present
across occupations. Horizontal segregation
is likely to be increased by post-industrial
restructuring of the economy (post-industrial
society), in which the expansion of service
industries has called for many women to enter
the workforce. The millions of housewives
who entered the economy during post-industrial
restructuring primarily entered into service
sector jobs where they could work part-time
and having flexible hours. While these options
are often appealing to mothers, who are often
responsible for the care work of their children
and their homes, they are also unfortunately
most available in lower-paying and lower status
occupations. The idea that nurses and teachers
are often pictured as women whereas doctors
and lawyers are often assumed to be men are
examples of how highly engrained horizontal
segregation is in our society.
=== Vertical ===
The term vertical segregation describes men's
domination of the highest status jobs in both
traditionally male and traditionally female
occupations. Colloquially, the existence of
vertical segregation is referred to as allowing
men to ride in a "glass escalator" through
which women must watch as men surpass them
on the way to the top positions. Generally,
the more occupational segregation present
in a country, the less vertical segregation
there is because women have a better chance
of obtaining the highest positions in a given
occupation as their share of employment in
that particular occupation increases.Vertical
segregation can be somewhat difficult to measure
across occupations because it refers to hierarchies
within individual occupations. For example,
the category of Education Professionals, (a
category in the Australian Standard Classification
of Occupations, Second Edition), is broken
down into "School Teachers," "University and
Vocational Education Teachers," and "Miscellaneous
Education Professionals." These categories
are then further broken down into subcategories.
While these categories aptly describe the
divisions within education, they are not comparable
to the hierarchical categories within other
occupations, and thus make comparisons of
levels of vertical segregation quite difficult.
== Maintenance mechanisms ==
=== 
Self-selection ===
Some women self-select out of higher status
positions, choosing instead to have more time
to spend at home and with their families.
According to Sarah Damaske, this choice is
often made because high status positions do
not allow time for the heavy domestic workload
that many women expect to take on due to the
gendered division of labor in the home. Working
class women, in particular, also sometimes
self-select out of more time-intensive or
higher -status positions in order to maintain
the traditional gender hierarchy and household
accord.
=== Educational disparities ===
Human capital explanations are those that
argue that an individual's and a group's occupational
and economic success can be at least partially
attributed to accumulated abilities developed
through formal and informal education and
experiences. Human capital explanations for
occupational segregation, then, posit that
a difference in educational levels of men
and women is responsible for persistent occupational
segregation. Contrary to this theory, however,
over past 40 years, women's educational attainment
has outpaced men's. One area of education
that might play a substantial role in occupational
segregation, however, is the dearth of women
in science and mathematics. STEM fields tend
to be pipelines to higher paying jobs. Therefore,
the lack of women in higher paying jobs might
be partially because they do not pursue science
and mathematics in school. This can be seen
in areas such as finance, which is very mathematics
heavy and is also a very popular field for
those who eventually rise to high status positions
in the private sector. This choice, like others,
is often a personal preference or made because
of the cultural idea that women are not as
good as men at mathematics.
=== Work experience disparities ===
Human capital explanations also posit that
men tend to rise to higher positions than
women because of a disparity in work experience
between the genders. Indeed, the gap between
men and women's tenure rises with age, and
female college graduates are more likely than
males to interrupt their careers to raise
children. Such choices may also be attributed
to the gendered division of labor which holds
women primarily responsible for domestic duties.
=== Preferences ===
Human capital explanations posit additionally
that men are more likely than women to preference
their work life over their family life. However,
the General Social Survey found that men were
only slightly less likely than women to value
short hours, and that preferences for particular
job characteristics depended mostly on age,
education, race, and other characteristics
rather than on gender. In addition, other
research has shown that men and women likely
hold endogenous job preferences, meaning that
their preferences are due to the jobs they
hold and those they have held in the past
rather than related inherently to gender.
After taking into consideration men and women's
jobs, there is no difference in their job
preferences. Men and women engaged in similar
types of work have similar levels of commitment
to work and display other similar preferences.
=== Job search strategies ===
According to sociologists Hanson and Pratt,
men and women employ different strategies
in their job searches that play a role in
occupational segregation. These differing
strategies are influenced by power relations
in the household, the gendered nature of social
life, and women's domestic responsibilities.
The last factor, in particular, leads women
to prioritize the geographical proximity of
paid employment when searching for a job.
In addition, most people have been found to
find their jobs through informal contacts.
The gendered nature of social life leads women
to have networks with smaller geographical
reach than men. Thus, the location of women
in female-dominated occupations which are
lower-status and lower pay is the result of
"severe day-to-day time constraints" rather
than a conscious and long-term choice made
that would be able to maximize pay and prestige.
== Gender ==
=== Gender pay gap ===
Women in female-dominated jobs pay two penalties:
the average wage of their jobs is lower than
that in comparable male-dominated jobs, and
they earn less relative to men in the same
jobs. In addition, women's wages are negatively
affected by the percentage of females in a
job, but men's wages are essentially unaffected.
The crowding hypothesis postulates that occupational
segregation lowers all women's earnings as
a result of women's exclusion from primarily
male occupations and segregation into a number
of predominantly female-dominated occupations.
Given that feminine skills are traditionally
rewarded less both in salary and prestige,
the crowding of women into certain occupations
makes these occupations valued less in both
pay and prestige.
Crowding is found to be alleviated through
macro-changes in occupational segregation.
Teaching, for example, at least in recent
generations, is traditionally a female- dominated
profession. However, when positions open up
for women in business and other high-earning
occupations, school boards must raise the
salaries of potential teachers to attract
candidates. This is an example of how even
women in traditionally female-dominated professions
still benefit salary-wise from the gendered
integration of the market.
=== Gendered division of labor ===
The gendered division of labor helps to explain
the hierarchy of power across gender identity,
class, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation.
Socialist feminists contribute to this ideology
through a Marxist frame of alienated labor
and the means of production. Heidi Hartmann
emphasized the gendered division of labor
as patriarchal control over women's labor.
Wally Saccombe suggested the mode of production
should become a unity of production and reproduction,
in which women's reproductive abilities are
viewed as a valuable source of labor or income.The
"wages for housework" movement in the late
1970s showcased the importance of gender inequality
in the workplace. Socialist feminists critiqued
the exploitation of women's household and
reproductive labor, since it was not viewed
as a commodity that deserved payment in the
market economy. Women often experience working
a "double day" or "second shift" when they
go to a wage-earning job and then come home
to take care of children and the home.
== Measurement ==
Occupational segregation is measured using
Duncan's D (or the index of dissimilarity),
which serves as a measure of dissimilarity
between two distributions. D has to be calculated
first:
Identify N different occupations.
Calculate the percentage of men (or other
ascribed category) who work in each of the
occupations and the percentage of women who
work in each occupation. Give men and women
a variable name (m1 could = men, w1 could
= women).
Duncan's D is calculated using this formula:
D=½εi|m1-w1|It is important to note that
Duncan's D uses percentages. So in a given
occupation, the number of men (or women) in
that occupation should be divided by the total
number of men (or women) in all of the occupations.
For example: You may have 10 men who are nurses
out of 600 total men. The value for the occupation
of male nurses should be 10/600, or .0166.
== In the United States ==
Over the last century in the United States,
there has been a surprising stability of segregation-index
scores, which measure the level of occupational
segregation of the labor market. There were
declines in occupational segregation in the
1970s and 1980s, as technologies that made
the care work of the home quicker and easier
allowed more women time to enter the workforce.
However, occupational segregation remains
a fixed element of the United States workforce
today.
As recently as 1996, it has been found that
gender occupational segregation over the past
three generations has not decreased. In one
study, grown women working in the 1980s were
likely to have faced the same occupational
segregation faced by their mothers working
in the 1960s and their grandmothers working
in the 1940s.
== Solutions ==
Gender egalitarian cultural principles, or
changes in traditional gender norms, are one
possible solution to occupational segregation
in that they reduce discrimination, affect
women's self-evaluations, and support structural
changes. Horizontal segregation, however,
is more resistant to change from simply modern
egalitarian pressures. Changes in norms may
reinforce the impact of occupational integration
in that once people see women in traditionally
male-dominated occupations, their expectations
about women in the labor market might be changed.Some
scholars, such as Haveman and Beresford, therefore
argue that any policies aimed at reducing
occupational inequality must focus on culture
changes. According to Haveman and Beresford,
people in the United States have historically
tended to reject policies that only support
one group (unless that group is them). Therefore,
effective policies for limiting occupational
segregation must aim to provide benefits across
groups. Therefore, policies that aim at capping
work hours for salaried workers or mandate
on-site employer sponsored childcare might
be most effective.In addition, the more occupational
integration that occurs, the more women are
in the positions to make powerful decisions
affecting occupational segregation. If the
overall market becomes less segregated, those
who make personnel decisions in traditionally
female-dominated occupations will have to
make jobs, even higher status jobs, more attractive
to women to retain them. School boards, for
example, will have to appoint more women to
department head positions and other positions
of authority in order to retain women workers,
whereas those jobs might previously have gone
to men.
== On the basis of sexual orientation ==
In addition to gender, sexual orientation
can also be a significant basis for occupational
segregation: there is a disproportionately
high number of gay and lesbian workers in
certain occupations. Research shows that gay
men are more likely to be in female-majority
occupations than are heterosexual men, and
lesbians are more represented in male-majority
occupations than are heterosexual women, but
even after accounting for this tendency, common
to both gay men and lesbians is a propensity
to concentrate in occupations that provide
task independence or require social perceptiveness,
or both.
== See also ==
Achievement gap in the United States
Division of labour
Gender equality
Glass ceiling
Mommy track
Occupational inequality
Occupational sexism
Online segregation
Shared earning/shared parenting marriage
Social stratification
== 
References ==
=== Bibliography ===
Bergmann, B.R. (1981). "The Economic Risks
of Being a Housewife". The American Economic
Review (71): 81–6.
Biblarz, T. J.; Bengtson, V. L.; Bucur, A.
(1996). "Social mobility across three generations".
Journal of Marriage 
and the Family. 58 (1): 188–200. doi:10.2307/353387.
JSTOR 353387.Chafetz, J.S. (1988). "The Gender
Division of Labor and the Reproduction of
Female Disadvantage: Toward an Integrated
Theory". Journal of Family Issues. 9: 108–131.
doi:10.1177/019251388009001006.
Charles, M. (2003). "Deciphering Sex Segregation:
Vertical and Horizontal Inequalities in Ten
National Labor Markets". Acta Sociologica.
46: 267–287. doi:10.1177/0001699303464001.
Cohen, P. (2004). "The Gender Division of
Labor: 'Keeping House' and Occupational Segregation
in the United States". Gender and Society.
18: 239–52. doi:10.1177/0891243203262037.
Cohen, P.N.; Bianchi, S.M. (1999). "Marriage,
children, and 
women's employment: What do we know?". Monthly
Labor Review (122): 22–31.
Cotter, D.A.; DeFiore, J.; Hermsen, J.M.;
Kowalewski, B.M.; Vanneman, R. (1997). "All
women benefit: The macro-level effect of occupational
integration on gender earnings equality".
American Sociological Review. 62: 714–34.
doi:10.2307/2657356.
Damaske, S. (2004). "A 'Major Career Woman'?
How Women Develop Early Expectations About
Work". Gender and Society (25): 409–430.
Hanson, S.; Pratt, G. (1991). "Job Search
and the Occupational Segregation of Women".
Annals of the American Association 
of Geographers. 81: 229–253. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8306.1991.tb01688.x.
Haveman, H.A.; Beresford, L.S. (2012). "If
you're so smart, why aren't you the boss?
Explaining the persistent vertical gender
gap in management". The Annals of the American
Academy of Political and Social Science. 639:
114–30. doi:10.1177/0002716211418443.
Mincer, J. (1891). "Human Capital and Economic
Growth". NBER Working Paper (802).
Tilcsik, A.; Anteby, M.; Knight, C. (2015).
"Concealable Stigma and Occupational Segregation:
Toward a Theory of Gay and Lesbian Occupations"
(PDF). Administrative Science Quarterly. 60
(3): 446–481.
Watts, M.J. (2005). "On the Conceptualisation
and Measurement of Horizontal and Vertical
Occupational Gender Segregation". European
Sociological Review. 21: 481–488. doi:10.1093/esr/jci034.
Weeden, K. (2007). Ritzer, George, ed. Occupational
Segregation. Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology.
Blackwell Publishing.Online: "Blackwell Reference
Online". 31 March 2008.
