Gender differences in occupational distributions among workers

Paul E. Gabriel is professor of economics, School of Business Administration, Loyola University of Chicago; and Susanne Schmitz is professor of economics, Center for Business and Economics, Elmhurst College. E-mail: pgabrie@luc. edu E-mail: susans@ elmhurst.edu Recent analyses of gender employment patterns suggest that occupational differences between men and women are a persistent presence in the U.S. labor market. Traditional blue-collar occupations such as operatives and craft continue to be male dominated, while women remain concentrated in service and clerical occupations. (See table 1.) Other occupations, such as managerial, professional and technical, and sales appear to be distributed almost evenly by gender. For women, the most popular occupations are clerical (a traditionally female-dominated occupation) and professional and technical; for men, the most popular occupations are production and craft, professional and technical, and managerial. Table 1 also presents a well-known measure of the disparity in occupational distributions: the Index of Dissimilarity (ID). This index, based on the absolute deviation in the percentages of men and women across occupations, is defined as