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What is the relationship between gender segregation in higher education and gender segregation in the labor market? Using Fossett's (2017) difference-of-means method for calculating segregation indices and data from the American Community Survey, we show that approximately 36% of occupational segregation among college-educated workers is associated with gender segregation across 173 fields of study, and roughly 64% reflects gender segregation within fields. A decomposition analysis shows that fields contribute to occupational segregation mainly through endowment effects (men's and women's uneven distribution across fields) than through the coefficient effects (gender differences in the likelihood of entering a male-dominated occupation from the same field). Endowment effects are highest in fields strongly linked to the labor market, suggesting that educational segregation among fields in which graduates tend to enter a limited set of occupations is particularly consequential for occupational segregation. Within-field occupational segregation is higher among heavily male-dominated fields than other fields, but it does not vary systematically by fields' STEM status or field–occupation linkage strength. Assuming the relationship between field segregation and occupational segregation is at least partly causal, these results imply that integrating higher education (e.g., by increasing women's representation in STEM majors) will reduce but not eliminate gender segregation in labor markets.

This paper introduces a new statistical methodology for estimating Duncan dissimilarity indexes of occupational segregation by sex in administrative areas and time periods. Given that direct estimators of the proportion of men (or women) in the group of employed people for each occupational sector are not accurate enough in the considered estimation domains, we fit to them a three-fold Fay–Herriot model with random effects at three hierarchical levels. Based on the fitted area-level model, empirical best predictors of the cited proportions and Duncan segregation indexes are derived. A parametric bootstrap algorithm is implemented to estimate the mean squared error. Some simulation studies are included to show how the proposed predictors have a good balance between bias and mean squared error. Data from the Spanish Labour Force Survey are used to illustrate the performance of the new statistical methodology and to give some light about the current state of sex occupational segregation by province in Spain. Research claims that there is a sex gap that persists despite advances in the inclusion of women in the labour market in recent years and that is related to the unequal sharing of family responsabilities and the stigmas still present in modern societies.

The purpose of this article is to determine whether there is a relationship between the proportion of women working in an occupation and the prestige assigned to that occupation. Based on a representative sample of Spanish employees from the Spanish Quality of Working Life Survey, pooled-sample data (2007–2010) are used to show that occupations with larger shares of women present lower prestige, controlling for a set of objective individual and work-related variables, and self-assessed indicators of working conditions. However, the results obtained do not support the devaluation theory since an inverted-U relationship between female share and occupational prestige is observed. This conclusion holds even after passing a battery of robustness checks.

Occupational gender segregation is an obdurate feature of gender inequality in the United States The \"family plans thesis\"—the belief that women and men deliberately adjust their early career decisions to accommodate their anticipated family roles—is a common theoretical explanation of this segregation in the social sciences and in popular discourse. But do young men and women actually account for their family plans when making occupational choices? This article investigates the validity of this central mechanism of the family plans thesis. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 100 college students at three universities, I find that most women and men report no deliberate consideration of their family plans in their college major or post-graduation career choices. Only a quarter of men accommodate provider role plans in their choice of occupations, and only 7 of 56 women (13 percent) accommodate caregiving plans. Further, men who anticipate a provider role are not typically enrolled in more men-dominated fields, and women who seek caregiver-friendly occupations are not typically enrolled in more women-dominated fields. These findings question the validity of the family plans thesis and suggest instead that the thesis itself may reproduce segregation as a cultural schema that buttresses essentialist stereotypes about appropriate fields for men and women.

Why is there so much occupational sex segregation in the 21st century? The authors cast light on this question by using the O*NET archive of occupation traits to operationalize the concepts of essentialism and vertical inequality more exhaustively than in past research. When the new model is applied to recent U.S. Census data, the results show that much vertical segregation remains even after the physical, analytic, and interactional forms of essentialism are controlled; that essentialism nonetheless accounts for much more of total segregation than does vertical inequality; that the physical and interactional forms of segregation are especially strong; that the physical form of essentialism is one of the few examples of female-advantaging segregation; and that essentialism takes on a fractal structure that generates much finely detailed segregation at detailed occupational levels. The authors conclude by discussing how essentialist processes partly account for the intransigence of occupational sex segregation.

Racial segregation between U.S. workplaces is greater today than it was a generation ago. This increase happened alongside declines in within-establishment occupational segregation, on which most prior research has focused. We examine more than 40 years of longitudinal data on the racial employment composition of every large private-sector workplace in the United States to calculate between- and within-establishment trends in racial employment segregation over time. We demonstrate that the return of racial establishment segregation owes little to within-establishment processes, but rather stems from differences in the turnover rates of more and less homogeneous workplaces. Present research on employment segregation focuses mainly on within-firm processes. By doing so, scholars may be overstating the country’s progress on employment integration and ignoring other avenues of intervention that may give greater leverage for further integrating firms.

Household labor is commonly defined as a set of physical tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping. Sociologists sometimes reference non-physical activities related to “household management,” but these are typically mentioned in passing, imprecisely defined, or treated as equivalent to physical tasks. Using 70 in-depth interviews with members of 35 couples, this study argues that such tasks are better understood as examples of a unique dimension of housework: cognitive labor. The data demonstrate that cognitive labor entails anticipating needs, identifying options for filling them, making decisions, and monitoring progress. Because such work is taxing but often invisible to both cognitive laborers and their partners, it is a frequent source of conflict for couples. Cognitive labor is also a gendered phenomenon: women in this study do more cognitive labor overall and more of the anticipation and monitoring work in particular. However, male and female participation in decision-making, arguably the cognitive labor component most closely linked to power and influence, is roughly equal. These findings identify and define an overlooked—yet potentially consequential—source of gender inequality at the household level and suggest a new direction for research on the division of household labor.

Indian women’s labor force participation rates have long demonstrated a U-shaped relationship with their education, rather than a more conventional positive linear relationship. The low rates of employment for moderately educated women are usually explained either as a result of the cultural stigma of women’s employment in a patriarchal society or because of the lack of demand from white-collar and light manufacturing jobs for women with middle levels of education. Using especially well-suited data from two waves of the India Human Development Survey, we test these explanations by examining the education–employment relationship in districts with low cultural stigma (low observance of purdah) and high proportions of (salaried) employment considered “suitable” for women. We find little support for either the cultural or structural explanations: the education–employment relationship remains U-shaped in districts with low stigma or with more “suitable” salaried employment. Instead, we suggest a better explanation lies in the high levels of gender segregation where most white-collar jobs are reserved for men. We simulate what the education–employment relationship would look like if these white-collar occupations were female-dominated as they are in most places in the world and find a more conventional linear relationship.

It is widely accepted that the conflict between women’s family obligations and professional jobs’ long hours lies at the heart of their stalled advancement. Yet research suggests that this “work–family narrative” is incomplete: men also experience it and nevertheless advance; moreover, organizations’ effort to mitigate it through flexible work policies has not improved women’s advancement prospects and often hurts them. Hence this presumed remedy has the perverse effect of perpetuating the problem. Drawing on a case study of a professional service firm, we develop a multilevel theory to explain why organizations are caught in this conundrum. We present data suggesting that the work–family explanation has become a “hegemonic narrative”—a pervasive, status-quo-preserving story that prevails despite countervailing evidence. We then advance systems-psychodynamic theory to show how organizations use this narrative and attendant policies and practices as an unconscious “social defense” to help employees fend off anxieties raised by a 24/7 work culture and to protect organizationally powerful groups—in our case, men and the firm’s leaders—and in so doing, sustain workplace inequality. Due to the social defense, two orthodoxies remain unchallenged—the necessity of long work hours and the inescapability of women’s stalled advancement. The result is that women’s thin representation at senior levels remains in place. We conclude by highlighting contributions to work–family, workplace inequality, and systems-psychodynamic theory.

Using data from the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN) 1977–2000, we examine sex segregation in a paradigmatic female-dominated occupation—nursing. We find that contrary to the vertical pattern of occupational stratification implied by the \"glass escalator,\" men are not disproportionately represented in administrative posts. Instead, we find a pervasive pattern of horizontal sex segregation, whereby men and women are disproportionately clustered in particular gendered specialties. Using in-depth interviews with a sample of registered nurses, we show that male nurses tend to gravitate toward areas of nursing they perceive to be more \"masculine.\" Our findings have implications for other female-dominated occupations because the bottom-heavy structure of most occupations limits the number of men (as well as women) from reaching the top positions within the field, meaning that horizontal sorting processes of acclimation sortmostmale employees in female-dominated professions.