Abstract
Gender Differences in Early Occupational Choices: Evidence from Medical Specialty Selection
Highlights
Over the past decades, women have made important progress on the labour markets of most developed countries, resulting into what Goldin (2014) refers to as one of the “grandest advances in society and the economy”: the converging roles of men and women
To isolate the role of job seekers’ preferences in the determination of gender-based occupational segregation, the ideal experiment would compare the occupational choices of individuals with similar characteristics who face no screening by employers and the same occupational choice set, and who differ only in their gender
Women at the top of the performance distribution are 7.4 percentage points less likely to choose cardiology, 5.4 percentage points less likely to choose anesthesiology, and 5.5 percentage points less likely to choose general surgery. They are 3.7 more likely to self-select into gynecology, 4.4 percentage points more likely to self-select into general practice, 5.4 percentage points more likely to choose pediatrics, and 5.4 percentage points more likely to choose dermatology than their male counterparts facing the same choice set
Summary
Women have made important progress on the labour markets of most developed countries, resulting into what Goldin (2014) refers to as one of the “grandest advances in society and the economy”: the converging roles of men and women. The allocation mechanism ensures job seekers’ true preference elicitation, since their optimal strategy is always to select their most preferred position within the available ones Fourth, this setting allows to identify a group of individuals who, given their performance at the National Ranking Examinations, make their occupational choice when all positions still offer at least one vacancy. The two factors which were originally put forward by the literature as the main drivers of gender-based occupational segregation and differences in labour market outcomes are discrimination (taste-based or statistical) and human capital accumulation (via education and work experience) (Altonji and Blank, 1999)
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