Gender segregated labor markets and social inequality between occupations

This thesis is concerned with the link between gender segregation in the labor market and social inequality between occupations. Two topical questions are at the basis of the presented research: First, are female-typed jobs paid less than other jobs? Second, does women’s gender-typed occupational sorting lead to wage inequalities in the female population? In both cases, interest lies in sizes of statistical effects or associations, and in the mechanisms driving observed results. All three of the empirical chapters in this thesis employ a measure of occupations’ gender-type. This way, we classify occupations–either on a continuous or a categorical scale–as rather female-typed, male-typed, or as gender integrated. Confirming broad findings in the extant literature on segregation, this thesis identifies occupational gender-types as a key structural component of past and current wage inequality. Results on the United States suggest that cultural devaluation of female-typed jobs has been confined to the immediate post-war era, and to jobs in the bottom eighty percent of the wage ladder. Effects have strongly declined over time, which we explain by historical trends in society’s adoption of gender-egalitarian views. Analyses of the German case also show a strong link between segregation and wage disparities. This is evidenced by two separate findings: First, occupational gender stereotypes covary negatively with wages in the bottom half of the wage distribution, and in particular for women. Second, gender segregation has recently become a source of emerging wage inequality between women. The most important factor explaining this trend has been the increasing rate at which highly educated women select into male-typed jobs.