Occupational Gender Segregation Research Articles

Stuck at the Bottom? Gender and Immigrants’ Entrapment in Low-skilled Work

Immigrant women are widely portrayed as facing a serious labor market disadvantage, yet gender differences in immigrants’ occupational mobility have been little explored. The article studied gender gaps in immigrants’ occupational entrapment, defined as entering and remaining in low-skilled/low-prestige work rather than moving on to more skilled/prestigious work. The analyses were based on longitudinal register data and followed five immigrant cohorts arriving in Sweden in the early 2000s over a 12-year period. The results show that immigrant women were more likely than men to start out in a low-skilled/low-prestige job and less likely to experience occupational mobility. However, tertiary education strongly mitigated these gender gaps. At the same time, the differences between high- and low-educated individuals widened more among women than among men. Family-related factors and country-specific human capital did not explain these patterns, but the findings indicate that occupational gender segregation can be crucial to immigrants’ mobility prospects.

Women migrant workers’ (WMWS) deskilling

Women are key actresses in sending and receiving countries’ developments, and their contributions includes social and financial remittances, education and the transmission of social and cultural values (United Nations, 2006). Despite, women migrants’ undeniable contributions, they too often undergo deskilling, a process defined as the employment of workers in a different field or below their qualifications. The factors influencing deskilling include the lack of recognition of skills and qualifications, difficult access to information and employment opportunities, lack of support in the destination country and linguistic barriers. Migration can impact the social mobility of women migrants, yet not always positively (Nowicka, 2012). In the labour market, women migrants are generally disadvantaged because of occupational gender segregation, the lack of network support and childcare responsibilities (EU Commission, 2022), with higher risks of deskilling and downward social mobility. The objective of the brief is to shed light on WMWs’ deskilling and explore the impact of gender and ethnicity in labour segmentation, de-emancipation being a consequence of WMWs’ deskilling and overrepresentation in reproductive unskilled jobs.

Gender wage gap among young adults: A comparison across British cohorts

We study the evolution of the gender wage gap among young adults in Britain between 1972 and 2015 using data from four British cohorts born in 1946, 1958, 1970 and 1989/90 on early life factors, human capital, family formation and job characteristics. We account for non-random selection of men and women into the labour market and compare the gender wage gap among graduates and non-graduates. The raw and covariate-adjusted gender wage gaps at the mean decline over the period among non-graduates, but they rise among young graduates. The gender wage gap across the wage distribution narrows over time for lower wages. Allowing for positive selection into employment increases the size of the gender wage gap in earlier cohorts, but selection is not apparent in the two most recent cohorts. Thus the rate of convergence in the wages of young men and women is understated when estimates do not account for positive selection in earlier cohorts. Differences in traditional human capital variables explain only a very small component of the gender wage gaps among young people in all four cohorts, but occupational gender segregation plays an important role in the later cohorts.

The shifting motherhood penalty and fatherhood premium in China's gig economy: Impact of parental status on income changes

The fatherhood premium and motherhood penalty are key concepts in the study of gender income gaps. Using an ordinary least squares model, influencing mechanism analysis and Oaxaca‐Blinder decomposition, we examine changes in Chinese gig workers’ income by gender, before and after parenthood. The results indicate that, in the Chinese gig economy, the motherhood penalty is vanishing, while the fatherhood premium has evolved into a fatherhood penalty owing to work pressure and the gender segregation of occupations in the gig economy, requiring men to balance their time and energy between work and childcare in a way that is not as prevalent in other sectors.

Gender and Employment: Occupational Gender Segregation in Cities of China

Gender and Employment: Occupational Gender Segregation in Cities of China

Gender and Career: Occupational Gender Segregation in China

Gender and Career: Occupational Gender Segregation in China

Gender equality eliminates gender gaps in engagement with female-stereotypic domains.

Although prior work reveals that gender bias against women produces gender gaps favoring men in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics engagement, research has yet to explore whether gender bias against men produces gender gaps favoring women in health care, early education, and domestic (HEED) engagement. Supporting preregistered predictions, results from an online study with MTurkers (N = 296) and a laboratory study with college students (N = 275) revealed that men expressed less sense of belonging, positivity toward, and aspirations to participate in HEED (and anticipated more discrimination) than did women when exposed to the reality of antimale gender biases in these domains. However, when told that HEED displays gender equality, men's engagement matched women's. Moderated mediation analyses revealed the importance of sense of belonging (and to a lesser extent, anticipated discrimination) in explaining why gender bias leads men to express less HEED positivity and aspirations than women. The current research thus provided novel evidence suggesting that gender bias contributes to men's underrepresentation in HEED, with important implications for broader occupational gender segregation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Do job aspirations cause job choice? Insights from women entering male‐dominated occupational training in India

AbstractMotivationThe participation rate of women in India's labour force is not only one of the lowest in the world, it has also been declining. To increase women's employment, some observers argue for reducing occupational gender segregation so that more women enter non‐traditional jobs.PurposeI ask how aspirations for non‐traditional jobs are formed among young women in Delhi. The aim was to enable policy‐makers to foster occupational aspirations for non‐traditional jobs so women could enter jobs considered to be men's work, reducing gender segregation and increasing women's participation in the labour market.Methods and approachI interviewed 72 young women from low‐income households in Delhi, following a semi‐structured guide. These young women were training either in jobs seen as the preserve of men—taxi drivers, electricians, and electronics mechanics—or in traditionally female work in beauty salons.FindingsContrary to conventional wisdom, young women's entry into non‐traditional training in Delhi was not a result of their occupational aspirations. Rather, entry into training saw them aspire to the jobs for which they trained.Policy implicationsTo increase women's entry into jobs dominated by men, policy‐makers do not need to influence young women's occupational aspirations. Instead, they should focus on factors that directly affect job entry—for example, having training centres close to where these young women live—and provide opportunities for young women to train.Traditional concepts of occupational aspirations, generally derived from the global North, do not apply in the same way to young women in India. My study raises questions about these conceptions of aspirations and prompts future studies to assess whether they apply in other parts of the global South.

Occupational Gender Segregation and Mental Health among Professionals: Women’s Risk Exposure in Five Micro Classes

This study explores the intricate interplay between gender, occupation, and mental health using data from the 2020 EU-LFS ad hoc module on 38,066 female professionals in Western Europe. We examine their exposure to work-related risks impacting mental health, focusing on variables such as work overload, violence, and challenging client interactions. Our primary objective is to discern how various occupations contribute to distinct experiences of work-induced strains. Key findings challenge the compensating differential theory, according to which the lower wages in female-dominated occupations are compensated by more friendly working conditions, revealing that interactive service-sector jobs pose higher risks to mental well-being. Health professionals, legal-cultural professionals, and teachers are particularly susceptible, with shift and weekend work exacerbating risk exposure to violence and violent behaviors. This study underscores the significance of a “within-gender” perspective, uncovering nuanced occupation-based inequalities for women. It introduces a novel approach to occupational segregation, highlighting the uneven distribution of work-induced strains among different occupations. It also urges to reassess customer-worker relationships and proposes gender-specific measures to alleviate heightened risks to mental well-being for interactive service occupations. In conclusion, this study analyzes the intersection of gender, occupation, and work-induced strains, emphasizing the role of micro-classes in shaping women’s mental health.

Are Too Many Women Crowding out Men in the Job Market?

Occupational gender segregation refers to the imbalance of occupational distribution and the large gap in occupational development between women and men due to gender characteristics, which is an important manifestation of gender discrimination in the labor market. Based on the data of China General Social Survey, the Duncan Index and Carmel-MacLachlan index, two indices measuring gender occupational segregation, were used to perform multiple logit regression for the explained variables with multiple values. Gender occupational segregation was found. Finally, based on the existing research, the regression analysis of the influence of traditional gender concepts and education level shows that the improvement of traditional gender concepts and education level is helpful to weaken gender occupational segregation.

Women shaking the concept of 'men's work' in Turkey: A critical discourse analysis of the news reports

This study explores online news discourses characterized by their unique semiotic and textual properties to unveil any discursive exclusionary or inclusionary constructions regarding women's movement to gender-atypical occupations in Turkey. Adopting the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis and macrostructural analysis of discourse (van Dijk, 1980), the study analyses a dataset of online newspapers and news portals on women working in male-dominated occupations to understand how they construct and proliferate a discriminatory or supportive attitude in shaping public attention. The findings reveal that the concept of 'men's work' is challenged in the news reports by an ironical and disbelieving tone to question the occupational gender segregation. A constructive attitude exists by an apparent focus on women's achievements in so-called 'men's work'. With respect to women's perception of their presence in gender-atypical jobs, though they acknowledge some difficulties they face, their confidence in their strength and perseverance is obvious in their narratives with a strong emphasis on keeping their femininity.

Reasons for Gender Occupational Segregation in the Labor Market: Literature Review.

Reasons for Gender Occupational Segregation in the Labor Market: Literature Review.

Betting on Diversity—Occupational Segregation and Gender Stereotypes

Gender segregation of occupations and entire industries is widespread. The segregation could be the result of perceived job-specific productivity differences between men and women. It could also result from the belief that homogeneous teams perform better or from in-group bias of male or female recruiters. We investigate these explanations in two samples: students and personnel managers. The subjects bet on the productivity of teams that are homogeneous with respect to gender at the outset and then either remain homogeneous or become diverse. The teams work on tasks that differ with respect to gender stereotypes. We obtain similar results in both samples. Women are picked more often for the stereotypically female task, and men are picked more often for the stereotypically male task. Subjects believe that gender-diverse teams perform better, especially in the task with complementarities, and they display an own-gender bias. Elicited expectations about the bets of others reveal that subjects expect the gender stereotypes of tasks but underestimate others’ bets on diversity. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: The authors acknowledge financial support from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [Excellence Cluster EXC 2035/1 “The Politics of Inequality” (to U. Fischbacher), CRC TRR 190 “Rationality and Competition” (to D. Kübler), and the Excellence Cluster EXC 2055 “Contestations of the Liberal Script” (to D. Kübler)] and from Tamkeen [NYU Abu Dhabi Research Institute Award CG005 (to R. Stüber)]. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.4943 .

Research on the Importance of Female Employment Equality from an Equality Law Perspective

Equality between men and women is one of the social problems that modern society has been striving to solve, which is most obviously reflected in the equality of female workers in employment. With the advancement of society, the improvement of productivity has also put forward higher requirements for workers, and realized that the production capacity of female workers plays an important role in the development of social construction and the development of the rule of law. In the writing of this article, the main research method used is literature research. This paper first lists the unequal phenomena that women have encountered in the workplace, including the difficulty in finding jobs, promotion and occupational gender segregation. This paper analyzes the causes of this phenomenon from the aspects of social environment, social concepts and women themselves, discusses the significance of promoting employment equality, and puts forward suggestions for promoting employment equality from the perspectives of the formulation, implementation and supervision of laws.

Girls, Wives, Factory Lives : Fifty Years On

Anna Pollert revisits her 1970s ethnographic study of women’s working lives at the Churchman tobacco factory in Bristol to discuss her qualitative methodology and to summarize her findings. In vivid extracts, Pollert recalls the gendered world that women then faced at home as principal family carers and at work – pay, conditions, male managers, a male-dominated union – and analyses their views, values, and lives. Although the 2020s are a very different world from the 1970s, Pollert notes unwelcome continuities – occupational gender segregation, the gender pay gap (albeit narrowed), low pay, and the domestic division of labour in which women still do more work than men. A positive change is that women are more assertive about their rights. However, the greater openness and social liberalism has been accompanied by a fracturing of other certainties such as the availability of public provision and the growth of zero-hours and sub-contract labour. Pollert restates the value of ethnographic research in understanding what goes on at work ‘behind the headlines’ to understand the dynamics of workers’ consciousness and collective action.

Государственное регулирование занятости женщин и профессиональная сегрегация в российской сфере труда – 100 лет истории

This article investigates the dynamics of gender occupational segregation, a crucial parameter that reflects the position of men and women in the workforce and significantly influences gender disparities in pay and working conditions. Over the course of our country's history, efforts have been made to reduce such segregation, highlighting the importance of collecting information to assess the effectiveness of these initiatives. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of political documents and legislative acts from both the Soviet and post-Soviet eras, aimed at promoting equal rights and, in the past three decades, equal opportunities for women and men in the labor market, which have a significant impact on gender segregation in employment. It explores the transformation of perceptions regarding the strategies, methods, and conditions necessary to achieve gender equality. In the early Soviet period, the focus was on the ideological dogmatization of maximizing women's involvement in a wide range of professions and industries. This was accompanied by labor legislation restrictions on female employment in hazardous and demanding conditions (to safeguard health) and measures to protect women during childbirth and child-rearing. During the developed socialist period, an entire system of benefits and preferences was developed to create the most favorable conditions for working women to balance their professional and family responsibilities. This included expanding the list of prohibited professions and occupations for women. In the post-Soviet era, efforts shifted toward prohibiting gender discrimination in the workplace. Labor legislation was transformed to ensure that rights, benefits, and preferences related to child-rearing and care were assigned to both mothers and fathers with family responsibilities. Rights, benefits, and preferences related to childbirth and breastfeeding assigned solely to mothers. Restrictions on female employment in hazardous and strenuous conditions have been reduced, and in some cases, these restrictions have been seen as discriminatory. Additionally, the article analyzes the dynamics of gender differences in the occupational structure of employment for women and men, drawing on historical and contemporary statistics. It reveals that despite changes in the regulation of women's work, their distribution across sectors has consistently differed significantly from that of men. However, a period from the late 1920s to the post-war years stands out as a period of substantial reduction in gender occupational segregation. Subsequently, there was a gradual increase in the level of segregation, which continued with minor fluctuations in subsequent years. The empirical basis for this study relies on data from the Central Statistical Office of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and Rosstat. The statistical analysis of gender segregation dynamics in this study employed the Duncan index, which quantitatively assesses and compares differences between the distributions of women and men across sectors and types of economic activity.

When does gender occupational segregation start? An experimental evaluation of the effects of gender and parental occupation in the apprenticeship labor market

The apprenticeship market is the earliest possible entry point into the workforce in developed economies. Since early labor market shocks are likely magnified throughout professional life, avoiding mismatches between talent and occupations – for example due to gender- or status-based discrimination – appears crucial. This experimental study investigates the effects of applicant gender and its interaction with parental occupation on the probability of receiving an invitation to an interview in the Swiss apprenticeship labor market. We find no robust evidence of differential treatment by employers in most cases. Policies aimed at fostering gender equality across occupations should therefore focus on removing gender related educational or cultural barriers influencing occupational choices at young ages.

Creating a Chinese gender lexicon for detecting gendered wording in job advertisements

It is widely assumed that gendered wording in job advertisements can be a source of unconscious gender bias that contributes to occupational gender segregation, and gender lexicons have been developed and employed to detect gendered wording in job advertisements. The goal of this study is to create a Chinese job advertisement gender lexicon, the lack of which has impeded related research in China. Based on 53,786 job advertisements collected from a large employment website in China, the lexicon creation process enabled by supervised learning mainly involved identifying candidate gender words and determining their gender scores. The combination of Word2Vec and SVR yielded the highest performance and generated a new Chinese gender lexicon consisting of 1,429 masculine words and 1,064 feminine words with varying gender scores. The lexicon was successfully applied in gendered wording detection, revealing that masculinely and femininely worded job advertisements dominated different occupations in China. The superiority of the proposed lexicon creation method and the resultant lexicon are verified through comparisons.

Breaking the Glass Ceiling: Empowering Women in the Korean Labor Market after COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant damage to women’s labor. This study analyzes the situation of the Korean labor market from various angles using available national statistical data. While the employment rate fell and the unemployment rate rose due to COVID-19, the unemployment rate among young people in their 20s and the elderly in their 50s and older rose. Gender segregation in occupations and industries, a chronic problem in the Korean labor market, has intensified and also increased the gender wage gap. It was found that the gender wage gap was large in jobs where many women were engaged. Overall, the number of non-regular workers increased in jobs where women were concentrated, and the number of employed people among vulnerable groups decreased. Online classes and telecommuting due to social distancing have increased women’s housework and childcare burden. As a result, the employment rate of working women with young children fell. In this situation, the mismatch between job seekers and job openings also intensified, showing that the social employment system was not working properly. COVID-19 has adversely affected women in the labor market in Korea, especially elderly women with low education levels and non-regular female workers. The damage caused by the 1997 and 2008 economic crises was also concentrated on women’s labor, yet Korean society did not learn from those experiences. Although many efforts have been made over the past 10 years to resolve discrimination in the labor market and prevailing gender norms in Korean society, their effect has been insignificant. This study emphasizes the need for a more detailed and active women’s labor policy. It also presents the need for a social system that properly responds to pandemic situations like COVID-19.

Exploring the Gender Gap in Teleworking from Home. The Roles of Worker’s Characteristics, Occupational Positions and Gender Equality in Europe

Previous research suggests an under-representation of women among teleworkers before the Covid-19 pandemic. However, we know little about whether such a gender gap was substantial, and whether it could be explained by occupational gender segregation. We explore whether a gender gap in regularly teleworking existed in the EU-28 and analyse its possible constituents, drawing on data from the European Working Conditions Survey 2015. To form a group of potential teleworkers, the analytical sample was restricted to employees who made use of information and communication technology (N ≈ 16,000). Country fixed effects regression and multilevel models were applied. The results show that women were under-represented among teleworkers compared to men, also when occupational gender segregation is taken into account; the remaining gender gap in telework is estimated at 10%. For women, working part-time and working in the private sector was associated with lower incidences of telework, but not for men. Country characteristics explain a small but significant share of telework incidence. In countries that rank high on the Gender Equality Index and have a large public sector, telework was widespread, whereas it was less present in countries with higher shares of women in the fields of science and engineering. The findings support the view that the gender gap in teleworking from home is a matter of historically grown gender inequality.