Three Studies of Occupational Sex Segregation Using Conditional Logit Models

Abstract

This dissertation examines influences of gender essentialism on occupational mobility patterns underlying occupational sex segregation in the contemporary United States (2011-2015). Gender essentialism—the belief that men and women have fundamentally different skills, interests, and capacities—leads to gender-typed skills in the context of work: skills that are viewed as feminine (e.g., working with people) or masculine (e.g., working with machines). I examine the influence of requirements for these skills on workers’ occupational mobility, and in particular placement into sex-typical occupations. Previous studies have considered only the macro-level (gender essentialist forms of occupational sex segregation), or the micro-level (case studies of workers’ career decisions and work experiences). This dissertation addresses an intermediate gap: meso-level analysis linking essentialist structures of occupational sex segregation to individuals’ occupational mobility patterns.

I employ conditional logit models (CLMs) to represent workers’ occupational movements in terms of occupational characteristics, rather than privileging workers’ individual characteristics. Privileging occupational characteristics (i.e., gender-typed skills) highlights their influence on workers’ probability of occupational placement. CLMs make pairwise comparisons between workers’ occupational destinations and their “alternatives”, i.e., other occupations they can reasonably access. CLMs are not widely used in studies of occupational sex segregation, and this dissertation builds on initial efforts: in particular, I make more realistic assumptions about the alternative occupations available to workers. I use data spanning 2011-2015 (inclusive), from two sources: the Annual Economic and Social Supplement to the March Current Population Survey, and the O*NET database. The former provides individual-level data on year-to-year occupational mobility; the latter provides occupational characteristics.

Chapter 1 surveys literature on gender essentialism and occupational mobility, my own methodological approach, and the questions motivating each empirical chapter. In Chapter 2, I evaluate a hypothesis explaining why women with Bachelor’s degrees are less well-represented in female-dominated occupations (those where a majority of workers are female): feminine skills have a weaker influence on placing them there. I use CLMs to compare the influence of gender-typed skills on placement probabilities in sex-typical occupations (those where a majority of workers share the focal worker’s own sex), for women with and without Bachelor's degrees, relative to their occupational alternatives. In Chapter 3, I test the hypothesis that gendered work rewards help place workers in sex-typical occupations, relative to their available sex-atypical alternatives. I examine influences of gendered work rewards on men's and women's probabilities of placement in sex-typical occupations, relative to their sex-atypical occupational alternatives. In Chapter 4, I test two hypotheses explaining why requirements for physical strength—a masculine skill—increase women's placement probability in Professional occupations. Within Professional occupations, I analyze the influence of wages on workers' placement probability, and examine the joint distribution of feminine skills and selected masculine skills. Chapter 5 discusses the findings of Chapters 2-4, limitations of CLMs and O*NET data, and further applications of CLMs, for future research on occupational sex segregation.

I contribute to the literature on occupational sex segregation by demonstrating previously unexamined ways in which gender essentialism strongly influences workers’ placement in sex-typical occupations. This influence is heterogeneous across different groups of workers, e.g., by Bachelor’s degree attainment, occupational category, and sex. Chapters 2 and 3 suggest that skill development and work rewards play important roles in workers’ sex-typical occupational placement, and Chapter 4 suggests that gender-typed skills are important even in workers’ gender-atypical occupational placement.