Segregated and Integrated Occupations: A New Approach to Analysing Social Change

Abstract

Although equal opportunities legislation came into force in the early 1970s in Britain, the subsequent decline in occupational segregation has been regarded as disappointingly low. The explanation considered here is that the overall level of occupational segregation is the sum of two opposing trends which largely cancel out. Declining levels of occupational segregation in the full-time workforce have been hidden by the impact of the high degree of occupational segregation in the rapidly expanding part-time workforce, which is almost entirely female. Testing the hypothesis with data for trends over 1971–91 reveals the limitations of the widely used Dissimilarity Index and the Sex Ratio Index. An alternative approach is developed, which captures the changing importance of integrated occupations within the overall pattern of occupational segregation, and displays conflicting trends within the full-time and part-time workforces, as expected. This new approach to assessing trends in women's position in the labour force also offers advantages over the conventional ‘single number’ indices for cross-national comparative research, for linking the results of macro-level analyses of national statistics with micro-level case-study research, and thus for explaining continuities and change in occupational segregation and the associated sex differential in earnings.