Abstract
In this article, we develop a gender-specific crosswalk based on dual-coded Current Population Survey data to bridge the change in the census occupational coding system that occurred in 2000 and use it to provide the first analysis of the trends in occupational segregation by sex for the 1970–2009 period based on a consistent set of occupational codes and data sources. We show that our gender-specific crosswalk more accurately captures the trends in occupational segregation that are masked using the aggregate crosswalk (based on combined male and female employment) provided by the U.S. Census Bureau. Using the 2000 occupational codes, we find that segregation by sex declined substantially over the period but at a diminished pace over the decades, falling by only 1.1 percentage points (on a decadal basis) in the 2000s. A primary mechanism by which segregation was reduced was through the entry of new cohorts of women, presumably better prepared than their predecessors and/or encountering less labor market discrimination; during the 1970s and 1980s, however, occupational segregation also decreased within cohorts. Reductions in segregation were correlated with education, with the largest decrease among college graduates and very little change in segregation among high school dropouts.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Blau and Kahn (2006) found, based on controls for 19 occupations, that slowing occupational convergence of men and women explained some of the slowing convergence in the gender pay gap in the 1990s compared with the 1980s.
“The American Community Survey (ACS) is the new source for the information previously collected through the decennial census long form” (U.S. Census Bureau 2009a: 1). However, we note that there are differences in sample design between the ACS, which uses a series of monthly samples, and the census, which collects data once per decade (U.S. Census Bureau 2009b).
This comparison is reported in Blau et al. (2010: chap. 5). They noted that the 1990 values of the index differ across the studies (data sets) but argued that the changes in the index may be compared. Beller (1985) made a similar assumption when comparing the 1960s and 1970s decreases in segregation using the census and CPS.
Personal communication from Barbara Downs, Chief, Industry and Occupation Statistics Branch, Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, U.S. Census Bureau (email, September 19, 2008).
These data sets are available online (http://thedataweb.rm.census.gov/ftp/cps_ftp.html). The data file titled “2000 Based Public Use Extract” contains the 2000 occupation (and industry) codes for each respondent in the CPS for each month over the 2000–2002 period. These data may be merged (using the combination of month, household ID, and person ID) with the standard CPS data sets (titled “Basic Monthly CPS”), which contain the 1990 occupation codes.
The CPS uses the 1970 occupation codes from 1971 to 1982, the 1980 occupation codes from 1983 to 1991, the 1990 occupation codes from 1992 to 2002, and the 2000 occupations codes starting in 2003.
The percentage of observations that had imputed occupations ranged from 4.0 % to 11.4 % for various years in the census/ACS data, and from 2.6 % to 2.9 % in the CPS data used in the crosswalk. The extent of imputation was similar by gender.
Sampling weights are not provided for the 1970 and 1980 census data.
A CPS crosswalk, based on aggregate employment, is available from the BLS in versions for converting the codes both forward and backward; see the BLS’s Tables 5 and 6, available online (www.bls.gov/cps/cpsoccind.htm).
Legislators and postmasters were included in “managers, all other,” and “judges” were classified with “lawyers”; separate reporting of these occupations was suppressed beginning in 1996 (personal communication from Gregory Weyland of the U.S. Census Bureau, e-mail, Aug. 25, 2010).
The crosswalk is available at IPUMS (http://usa.ipums.org/usa/resources/chapter4/occ_70-80.pdf).
In contrast to the results obtained using the gender-specific crosswalk, application of the census’s aggregate crosswalk to the 1990 census data yields implausible results for the change in the index over the 1990s: the index is found to have increased by 1.51 percentage points (from 50.52 in 1990 to 52.03 in 2000) using the 2000 occupation codes; see Blau et al. (2012). This conflicts not only with the results in Table 2, but also with our findings using CPS data presented in Fig. 1.
National Bureau of Economic Research Business Cycle Dating Committee (http://www.nber.org/cycles/main.html).
Declines were even larger using the 1990 codes. In contrast to the findings for later years, for 1970 and 1980, a higher level of segregation is obtained using the 1990 codes than using the 2000 codes.
In the 1970s, the contribution of female production jobs was larger than that of male production jobs.
Not surprisingly, given the overall trends in occupational segregation, data disaggregated by decade indicate that this inflow of women into male jobs was larger in the 1970s and 1980s than in the 1990s, and virtually died out in the 2000s.
The intracohort results are only suggestive in that they may be affected by changes over time in the composition of the group. Further, the last period shown in the table, 2000–2009, is slightly less than a full decade, but we include it as an indication of the trends over the 2000s.
For some suggestive evidence on such trends, see Dewan and Gebeloff (2012).
References
Beller, A. H. (1985). Changes in the sex composition of U.S. occupations, 1960–1981. Journal of Human Resources, 20, 235–250.
Bertrand, M. (2010). New perspectives on gender. In O. Ashenfelter & D. Card (Eds.), Handbook of labor economics (Vol. 4b, pp. 1545–1592). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier.
Bianchi, S. M., & Rytina, N. (1986). The decline of occupational sex segregation during the 1970s: Census and CPS comparisons. Demography, 23, 79–86.
Blau, F. D., Brummund, P., & Liu, A. Y.-H. (2012). Trends in occupational segregation by gender 1970– 2009: Adjusting for the impact of changes in the occupational coding system, (NBER Working Paper No. 17993). Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Blau, F. D., Ferber, M. A., & Winkler, A. E. (2010). The economics of women, men, and work (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Blau, F. D., & Hendricks, W. E. (1979). Occupational segregation by sex: Trends and prospects. Journal of Human Resources, 14, 197–210.
Blau, F. D., & Kahn, L. M. (2006). The U.S. gender pay gap in the 1990s: Slowing convergence. Industrial & Labor Relations Review, 60, 45–66.
Blau, F. D., & Kahn, L. M. (2007). Changes in the labor supply behavior of married women: 1980–2000. Journal of Labor Economics, 25, 393–438.
Blau, F. D., Simpson, P., & Anderson, D. (1998). Continuing progress? Trends in occupational segregation in the United States over the 1970s and 1980s. Feminist Economics, 4(3), 29–71.
Bradley, D., & Earle, K. (2001, August 5–9). Developing and explaining the crosswalk between census 1990 and 2000 industry and occupation codes. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the American Statistical Association.
Cotter, D. A., DeFiore, J. M., Hermsen, J. M., Marsteller Kowalewski, B., & Vanneman, R. (1995). Occupational gender desegregation in the 1980s. Work and Occupations, 22(3), 3–21.
Dewan, S., & Gebeloff, R. (2012, May 21). More men enter fields dominated by women. New York Times. Retrieved from http://nytimes.com
Duncan, O. D., & Duncan, B. (1955). A methodological analysis of segregation indexes. American Sociological Review, 20, 210–217.
England, P. (1981). Assessing trends in occupational segregation, 1900–1976. In I. Berg (Ed.), Sociological perspectives on labor markets (pp. 273–295). New York: Academic.
England, P. (2010). The gender revolution: Uneven and stalled. Gender and Society, 24, 149–166.
England, P., Allison, P., & Wu, Y. (2007). Does bad pay cause occupations to feminize, does feminization reduce pay, and how can we tell with longitudinal data? Social Science Research, 36, 1237–1256.
Fuchs, V. R. (1975). A note on sex segregation in professional occupations. Explorations in Economic Research, 2, 105–111.
Gibbs, J. P. (1965). Occupational differentiation of negroes and whites in the United States. Social Forces, 44, 159–165.
Goldin, C., Katz, L. F., & Kuziemko, I. (2006). The homecoming of American college women: The reversal of the college gender gap. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20, 133–156.
Gross, E. (1968). Plus ca change…? The sexual structure of occupations over time. Social Problems, 16, 198–208.
Guiso, L., Monte, F., Sapienza, P., & Zingales, L. (2008). Education forum: Culture, gender, and math. Science, 320, 1164–1165.
Jacobs, J. A. (1989). Long-term trends in occupational segregation by sex. The American Journal of Sociology, 95, 160–173.
Jacobs, J. A. (1999). The sex segregation of occupations: Prospects for the 21st century. In G. N. Powell (Ed.), Handbook of gender and work (pp. 125–141). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.
Jacobs, J. A. (2003). Detours on the road to equality: Women, work and higher education. Contexts, 2(1), 32–41.
Jacobsen, J. P. (1997). Forum: Trends in workforce segregation: 1980 and 1990 census figures. Social Science Quarterly, 78, 234–235.
King, M. C. (1992). Occupational segregation by race and sex, 1940–88. Monthly Labor Review, 115(4), 30–37.
King, M., Ruggles, S., Alexander, J. T., Flood, S., Genadek, K., Schroeder, M. B., . . . Vick, R. (2010). Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 3.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Levanon, A., England, P., & Allison, P. (2009). Occupational feminization and pay: Assessing causal dynamics using 1950–2000 U.S. census data. Social Forces, 88, 865–981.
Nam, C. B., & Boyd, M. (2004). Occupational status in 2000: Over a century of census-based measurement. Population Research and Policy Review, 23, 327–358.
Pan, J. Y. (2010). Gender segregation in occupations: The role of tipping and social interactions. Unpublished manuscript, Department of Economics, National University of Singapore.
Reskin, B. F., & Bielby, D. D. (2005). A sociological perspective on gender and career outcomes. Journal of Economic Perspectives, 19, 71–86.
Reskin, B. F., & Roos, P. A. (1990). Job queues, gender queues: Explaining women’s inroads into male occupations. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press.
Ruggles, S. J., Alexander, T., Genadek, K., Goeken, R., Schroeder, M. B., & Sobek, M. (2010). Integrated Public Use Microdata Series: Version 5.0 [Machine-readable database]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.
Scopp, T. S. (2003). The relationship between the 1990 census and census 2000 industry and occupation classification systems (U.S. Census Bureau Technical Paper #65). Washington, DC: U.S. Census Bureau.
U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (2011). Monthly Labor Review, 134(4).
U.S. Census Bureau. (2009a). A compass for understanding and using American Community Survey data: What PUMS data users need to know. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
U.S. Census Bureau. (2009b). Design and methodology, American Community Survey. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Valian, V. (1998). Why so slow? The advancement of women. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions of Andrea Beller, Jessica Pan, Myra Strober, Anne Winkler, the editor, two deputy editors, and three anonymous referees.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Appendix
Appendix
Table
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Blau, F.D., Brummund, P. & Liu, A.YH. Trends in Occupational Segregation by Gender 1970–2009: Adjusting for the Impact of Changes in the Occupational Coding System. Demography 50, 471–492 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0151-7
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-012-0151-7