Measuring gender segregation

This paper aims to fill some gaps in the literature concerning the sensitivity of segregation measures. We examine the definitions of regressive and progressive movement, and formally describe the requirements for these movements. As a result of this analysis, we relax a strong assumption established in the literature regarding these movements. Since these measures increase with regressive movement, we are interested in analyzing how the measures’ sensitivities vary as a function of the position of the strata. This analysis allows us to establish how the segregation measures behave with an increase in the number of people in one category in a stratum. We analyze these concepts in terms of the Gini index and the class of additively decomposable measures and analyze the sensitivity of the index of dissimilarity to regressive movements. Data from a national household survey are used to illustrate the results found in the paper.