Comment on suzanne M. Bianchi and Nancy Rytina’s “the decline in occupational sex segregation during the 1970s: Census and CPS comparisons”

Abstract

In their article, Bianchi and Rytina (1986) studied occupational sex segregation using the index of dissimilarity. They also decomposed the difference between the indexes of dissimilarity for two time periods into three components, namely, the effect of change in the occupational structure (called Mix), the effect of change in the occupational sex segregation (called Comp), and the interaction between these two effects, which they found by subtracting the two main effects from the total effect. Approximately the same results can be obtained from an alternative set of simpler formulas that includes one for the interaction term as well. The basic advantage of this new formulation is that it allows us to avoid the interaction term in a meaningful way along the lines suggested by Kitagawa (1955) and Das Gupta (1978, 1984). The procedure is described using the occupational data from the 1970 and 1980 censuses (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1984) as follows: n n n