Jumping to male-dominated occupations: A novel way to reduce the gender wage gap for Chinese women

Abstract

Occupational segregation is widely considered as one major reason leading to the gender discrimination in labor market. Using large-scale Chinese re-sume data of online job seekers, we uncover an interesting phenomenon that occupations with higher proportion of men have smaller gender wage gap measured by the female-male ratio on wage. We further show that the sever-ity of occupational segregation in China is low both overall and regionally, and the inter-occupational discrimination is much smaller than the intra-occupational discrimination. That is to say, Chinese women do not face large barriers when changing their occupations. Accordingly, we suggest Chinese women a new way to narrow the gender wage gap: to join male-dominated occupations. Meanwhile, it is worth noticing that although the gender wage gap is smaller in male-dominated occupations, it does not mean that the gender discrimination is smaller there.