Occupational mobility for whom?: Education, cohorts, the life course and occupational gender composition, 1970–2010

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, occupational segregation by gender has markedly declined in the United States. This paper uses data from the decennial censuses and the National Longitudinal Surveys from 1967 to 2013 to explore how trends over time in the occupational gender composition of women’s jobs vary according to educational attainment. The paper also examines the relative contributions of inter-generational and intra-generational occupational mobility to changes in occupational gender composition over time for high school educated women and women with a bachelor’s degree. The findings indicate that for women with a bachelor’s degree, declines in the likelihood of working in a female dominated occupation are primarily due to changes across cohorts. High school educated women experience smaller changes across cohorts but are more likely than women with a bachelor’s degree to move to gender integrated occupations over the course of their careers. Fixed effects models show that the changes over the life course reflect changes in the gender composition of individual women’s occupations rather than changes in the composition of the labor force. Both occupational mobility across and within broad groups of occupations contribute to changes in the occupational gender composition for high school educated women; for women with a bachelor’s degree, mobility across broad groups of occupations is most important.