The Determinants and Consequences of Gender Segregation in Occupation: Another barrier to the attainment of gender equality

This study clarifies the characteristics of gender segregation of occupations in Japan using the 2005 and 1995 surveys on Social Stratification and Mobility (SSM2005, SSM1995). This study distinguishes professional occupations into two types: type-II professionals which consist of human service professionals (professionals in education and childrearing, medicine and health/care, and social welfare) excluding those with highest socioeconomic status, namely, physicians and surgeons, dentists, and college professors; and type-I professionals which include all other professional occupations. This distinction was made because women's high representation in human service professions, which are found in Western countries, has not been realized for those professions with high socioeconomic status in Japan.

A comparison between Japan and the United States of gender differences in the distribution of eight major occupational groups that reflect the above mentioned distinction of type-I and type-II professionals revealed the following facts. First, women are far more represented among type-II professionals and clerical workers both in Japan and in the United States. Second, while women are underrepresented in both managers and type-I professionals, the extent of women's underrepresentation in those two occupations is far greater in Japan. Those differences indicate the relative handicap in wage for Japanese women compared with American women because managers and type-I professionals are the two groups of people with the highest average wages. The paper also shows in using the SSM2005 data that while the gender wage gap is relatively small among managers and among type-I professionals for which women are seriously underrepresented, there is a huge gender wage gap among type-II professional for which women are overrepresented.

Then the paper conducts a decomposition analysis of segregation. The methods realized in data counterfactual situations where women's distributions of covariates that affect occupational attainment become identical to men's in order to assess how much of gender segregation in occupation is explained as a result of gender differences in those covariates' distributions and how much remains unexplained. This analysis led to a paradoxical result: equalizing human capital characteristics (education, age, and duration of employment) between men and women increases, rather than decreases, gender segregation in occupation. This occurs because the extent to which the proportion of type-II professionals for which women are overrepresented increases far exceeds the extent to which the proportions of managers and type-I professionals increase, as human capital characteristics improve for women. The study discusses whether existing theories are consistent with those findings, and the paper concludes that a combination of statistical discrimination theory against women and theory on gender stereotypical practices in hiring and job assignments is most consistent with the findings. The paper also discusses policy implications of those findings.