Cardinal Measures of Occupational Segregation

Abstract

In the previous chapter we introduced two measures of occupational segregation, the Duncans’ (1955) famous Index I_D of Dissimilarity and the Gini-Segregation Index Gs, which is, in fact, an application of Gini’s (1916) Concentration Ratio to the study of occupational segregation and has been suggested recently by Silber (1989,a). We have seen that both the Duncans’ and the Gini-Segregation Index were, in fact, weighted measures of the dispersion of the gender ratios F;/M;. But these two are not the only indices which have been suggested as measures of occupational segregation. The purpose of the present chapter is precisely to give a survey of the various ways which have been proposed in the literature to measure the extent of occupational segregation. Then an illustration of the use of these indices based on Swiss Census data for the years 1970, 1980 and 1990 will be given.