Causes and Effects of Gender Occupational Segregation: Overlooked Obstacles to Gender Equality

Abstract

In this chapter, an extremely uneven distribution of professional occupations that women enter is revealed and the problems associated with these biases are elucidated. Professions are classified into two types: Type 1 professions, which include three representative human service professions of high socioeconomic status—namely, medical doctors, dentists, college professors—and all professions that are not human service professions; and Type 2 professions, which include human-service professions other than medical doctors, dentists, and college professors. Both the United States and Japan have a large number of women employed in Type 2 professions and clerical jobs; however, Japan has a markedly lower proportion of women in Type 1 professions and managerial positions than the United States. Moreover, an examination of the gender wage gap by occupation shows that the differences between men and women are relatively small within Type 1 professions and managerial positions, and women’s average wages in Type 2 professions and clerical occupations are much lower than those of men within the same occupations and are significantly lower than men’s average wages in blue-collar occupations. Thus, women are subject to a two-fold wage disadvantage. On the one hand, the proportion of women is miniscule in occupations with relatively high wage and smaller gender wage gaps (Type 1 professions and managerial positions). On the other hand, the proportion of women is large in white-collar occupations exhibiting the largest wage gaps by gender (Type 2 professions and clerical occupations). Further, in this chapter, whether gender occupational segregation can be explained by gender disparities in human capital is analyzed. The results, although paradoxical, indicate that the gender equalization of human capital intensifies occupational gender segregation between men and women. This segregation occurs because the increases of women in female-dominated Type 2 professions and the decreases of women in non-service manual occupations in which women are already underrepresented—as a result of more human capital—outpace the increases of women in underrepresented Type 1 professions and managerial positions. In this chapter, theories on gender occupational segregation are also reviewed and their consistency with the empirical results is examined.