Occupational sex segregation and the earnings of occupations: What causes the link among college-educated workers?☆
Introduction
In 2002, the female-to-male ratio of earnings was 0.778 among all workers over 25 years old, and among college-educated workers women earned only 74.3 cents for every dollar earned by men (Statistics, 2003). We know that a significant proportion of this sex gap is attributable to occupational sex segregation and the concentration of women in relatively low-paying occupations (Treiman and Hartmann, 1981).1 But, despite a rich body of research, we do not understand the causes of this continued sex gap in occupational attainment. The “ghettoization” of women in low-paying occupations persists despite the emergence of a female advantage in bachelor’s degree attainment, sex equity in the attainment of master’s and professional degrees (Bae et al., 2000), and growing gender equity in labor force participation and attachment (Bianchi, 1995, Reskin and Padavic, 1994). This economic dimension of occupational sex segregation is particularly puzzling given women’s advantage over men in the attainment of occupational status as measured by occupational education (Hauser and Warren, 1997, Warren et al., 1998), and the growing tendency for young women to attach as much importance as do young men to the extrinsic rewards of work (Marini et al., 1996).
Why do women continue to be employed disproportionately in lesser-paying occupations? We do not yet have a satisfactory answer to this question partly because prior research has been limited in several ways. First, previous research has not distinguished the relative contributions of educational and labor market processes, as it has not adequately controlled for the influence of gender segregation that occurs prior to labor market entry. Second, within- and between-occupation influences on the sex gap in earnings are often conflated as existing analyses typically model individual-level earnings with inadequate controls for occupation-level determinants. Third, previous studies have not identified how occupational characteristics are leveraged against one another in the face of actual choices and constraints since they include only limited sets of occupations and measures of the occupational characteristics. Furthermore, most previous research has focused on explaining the association between occupational gender composition and pay (England et al., 1994, England et al., 2000, Petersen and Morgan, 1995, Tam, 1997, Tomaskovic-Devey and Skaggs, 2002), rather than on the association between gender and occupational allocation (Reskin, 1993, Tomaskovic-Devey and Skaggs, 2002).
The research reported here addresses some of these limitations and aims to identify the link between sex-segregated occupational allocation and the earnings of occupations. I attempt to explain why the relationship between average occupational earnings and occupational attainment is less positive for women than it is for men by modeling occupational placement among a nationally representative sample of college-educated new labor force entrants drawn from the 1993 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG). Using a conditional logit model and a detailed classification of occupation, I first estimate the marginal sex difference in the association between occupational attainment and average occupational earnings. I then attempt to statistically account for the relationship by introducing to the model a strong control for human capital investments and a set of measures of occupational characteristics predicted by supply- and demand-side explanations to affect both the gendered allocation of workers and the valuation of occupations. Finally, I use a decomposition analysis to estimate the relative explanatory power of each factor that is hypothesized to explain why women are segregated into relatively low-paying occupations.
Section snippets
Influences on worker allocation and occupational remuneration
Both supply- and demand-side perspectives identify many of the same individual and occupational characteristics as important factors in the processes that generate occupational sex segregation and the sex gap in the attainment of high-paying occupations (Reskin, 1993). Primary among these are human capital investments, sex-typed abilities, and preferences for occupational characteristics. Supply-side explanations attribute occupational sex segregation to individual-level sex differences in the
Hypothesis
The empirical implication of the preceding discussion is that, for the college-educated work force, the occupational sex segregation and the resulting sex gap in the likelihood of placement in relatively lucrative occupations, may be explained in part by the following factors:
(1) Sex differences in human capital investments such as college major and specific vocational training.
(2) Sex-typed abilities expected for incumbents in occupations.
(3) Occupational characteristics that differentially
Data and methods
To test the above-stated research hypothesis, I model the individual-level occupational placement of a cohort of college-educated workers extracted from the 1993 National Survey of College Graduates (NSCG) as a function of occupation-level characteristics operationalized using data from multiple sources including the 1990 U.S. Census 1-Percent Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS) and the O*NET Occupational Information Network (O*NET). The analysis focuses on sex differences in the association
Occupational characteristics and sex differences in occupational placement
Table 2 presents model goodness-of-fit statistics and estimated coefficients from simple descriptive models that include each sex-by-occupational characteristic interaction separately and from the full model that includes all sex-by-occupational characteristic interactions. All models control for the full set (excluding one) of occupational category indicators. The estimated coefficient of earnings (i.e., bsex*earnings) in the descriptive earnings model represents the marginal sex difference in
Conclusion
The relationship between occupational segregation and the earnings gap has long been common knowledge among students of gender inequality. We know that women and men enter different occupations that are differentially remunerated. What has not been established, however, is which occupational characteristics are key to the generation of this between-occupation component of the earnings gap. The primary contribution of this study is that it begins to fill this knowledge gap by identifying the
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This research was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from the National Academy of Education and Spencer Foundation. I thank Yu Xie, Mary Jackman, Eric Grodsky, and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. A previous version of this paper was presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the International Sociological Association Research Committee on Social Stratification (RC28) in New York, NY.