Sex Segregation in the Workplace Trends, Explanations, Remedies (1984) / Chapter Skim
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7 Occupational Segregation and Labor Market Discrimination
7 Occupational Segregation and Labor Market Discrimination
Pages 117-143
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From page 117... ...
By March 1982, 76.6 percent of males and 52.1 percent of females were labor force participants.~ The large increase in participation ~ Black women's participation rates have historically been considerably higher than those of white women, although the differential has declined in recent years. In 1955 the labor force participation rate of black and other nonwhite women was 46.1 percent in comparison with 34.5 percent for whites.
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From page 118... ...
In the second section we first evaluate the empirical evidence on the degree of sex discrimination in the labor market, and then turn to an assessment of the role of employment segregation by sex in producing differential outcomes for men and women workers. ECONOMIC EXPLANATIONS OF SEX DIFFERENTIALS IN OUTCOMES Theories of Discrimination While most of the discrimination models discussed here were developed to explain or at least were illustrated in terms ofracial differences, we here apply them to sex differences.
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From page 119... ...
1261. In empirical work, where the wages of heterogeneous male and female labor are compared, this is approximated by the notion of pay differentials that are not accounted for by productivity differentials.
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From page 120... ...
Even if discrimination is made compatible with occupational segregation in the Becker model, segregation does not play a causal role in generating the sex pay differential. Rather, both occupational and pay differentials are due to tastes for discrimination among employers, coworkers, and/or customers.
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From page 121... ...
Further, discrimination may cause both pay and productivity differentials between potentially equally productive male and female labor women are less productive than men because, as a result of segregation and crowding, they have less capital to work with. The Bergmann formulation does not overcome the problem with the Becker model, noted earlier, that an extreme distribution of employer tastes is necessary to generate the high level of segregation we observe.
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From page 122... ...
7 Women are more likely than men are to quit their jobs to leave the labor force, while men are more likely than women to quit to change jobs (Barnes and Jones, 1974~. 8 Some preliminary evidence in support of the monopsony view as an explanation for male-female wage differentials across urban areas, based on data for white males and white, never-married females, is presented by Cardwell and Rosenzweig (1980~.
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From page 123... ...
. As they note, dispersion in risk aversion among employers should result in the bidcling up of women's wages, just as the existence of less discriminatory firms should erocle discriminatory pay differentials in the Becker-type tastefor-discrimination model.
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From page 124... ...
The human capital mode! can provide a consistent explanation for occupation and pay differentials by sex in terms of the voluntary choices of women rather than of market discrimination against them.
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From page 125... ...
Second, we explore the existing literature concerning the role of occupational segregation in producing pay differentials and, more briefly, some of what has been learned about the causes of such segregation. Discrimination and Earnings A crude test of the relative merits of the discrimination and human capital explanations for sex differences in earnings is provided by an examination of the time series trends in the sex pay differential.
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From page 126... ...
This makes it difficult for equal employment opportunity legislation to open the doors to such jobs for older women. Further, younger women may have had the opportunity to incorporate new expectations of greater labor force attachment over their life cycles into their human capital investment decisions to a greater extent than have older women.
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From page 127... ...
A related problem is the interpretation of sex differences in the coefficients of earnings regressions. For example, a smaller coefficient on labor force experience for women may reflect their decisions to invest in less on-thejob training than men do, as proposed by human capital theorists, or discrimination on the part of employers resulting in less access to on-thejob training opportunities.
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From page 128... ...
has argued that it is the wage offers, not the actual wages of males and females, that should be compared. The distribution of actual wages represents only that part of the offer distribution that is acceptable to job seekers.~7 Thus, according to Gronau, mean female wage offers will be overestimated by restriction of the sample to labor force participants.
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From page 129... ...
Mincer and Polachek were able to account for 45 percent of the pay gap between white married men and women in that age group on the basis of human capital variables, including actual labor market experience and time spent out of the labor force. In arriving at this estimate, they were aware of the joint determination of earnings and experience and at22 Oaxaca's results including controls for occupational and industrial characteristics are considered below.
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From page 130... ...
Yet the heart of the endogeneity problem is that wage discrimination may have influenced the amount of human capital that women have accumulated. Thus, it is likely that Mincer and Polachek and analyses modeled on theirs overestimate the impact of the human capital variables on the sex pay differential.
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From page 131... ...
found that adjustments for schooling, work history, and labor force attachment accounted for 36 percent of the wage gap between white men and white women and 27 percent of the wage gap between white men and black women. In addition to the difference in age group, some of the difference between Corcoran's and Mincer and Polachek's findings with respect to the importance of the human capital variables may reflect a growing work force attachment of women over the period spanned by the 1967 NLS and the 1976 PSID (Mincer, 19791.
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From page 132... ...
It is even possible that, given the male set of job opportunities (with similar returns to experience and job tenure) , they would exhibit the same degree of labor force commitment as that of males.
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From page 133... ...
The evidence reviewed here strongly suggests that labor market discrimination does indeed play a role in producing the observed male-female pay differential. While it is difficult to pinpoint the exact portion of the sex pay gap due to discrimination, the findings suggest that over half of the clifferential cannot be explained by sex differences in productivity-related factors.
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From page 134... ...
In that case a comparison of men's wages in male and female jobs wfl} not reflect an overcrowding differential. These two considerations suggest that empirical estimates may understate the contribution of employment segregation to the sex pay gap.
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From page 135... ...
Using data from the 1980 census, Treiman and Hartmann (1981) found that 35 to 39 percent of the earnings difference between men and women was associated with sex differences in the distribution of their employment among 479 detailed categories.28 Occupational differences appear to be a significant factor in explaining the sex pay gap, even when other productivity-related factors are controlled for.
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From page 136... ...
The remainder, 76 percent, is due to sex differences in distribution among occupational categories within the firm. Occupational differences explain somewhat less than half of the discriminatory pay gap in the case of blacks and other minorities (controlling for sex)
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From page 137... ...
But there are some advantages to the use of hay points as an overall measure of job level that cuts across male and female jobs. It overcomes one of the practical problems with efforts to ascertain the size of intraoccupational sex pay differentials: paucity of data on one sex group or another within a job category due to the very sex segregation by occupation that we seek to study.32 These results support the notion that studies of the impact of occupation undertaken at the level of the firm and utilizing job categories more closely approximating the job titles used by the employer will reveal a greater impact of job category on wages than aggregate analyses.
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From page 138... ...
She argues that within such narrow cate gories male and female labor is likely to be fairly homogeneous.35 Blau finds that within occupations men and women are segregated by establishments to an extent in excess of what would be expected on the basis of chance. Within firms, occupational pay dif ferences are found to be relatively small, and sex pay differentials within occupations are primarily due to differences in pay rates among (rather than within)
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From page 139... ...
Some emphasize labor market discrimination, while others, most notably the human capital model, focus on the voluntary choices of women. A review of the empirical literature strongly suggests that, all else equal (including fairly refined meas ures of work experience and labor force at tachment)
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From page 140... ...
D 1975 "Longitudinal Patterns of Female Labor Force Participation," in H
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From page 141... ...
1981 "Wage Appreciation and Depreciation: A Test of Neoclassical Economic Explanations of Occupational Sex Segregation," mimeo (Dec.~. 1982 "The Failure of Human Capital Theory to Explain Occupational Sex Segregation," Journal of Human Resources, 17, 3 (Summer)
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From page 142... ...
137-157. "Occupational Self-Selection: A Human Capital Approach to Sex Differences in Occupational Structure," Review of Economics and Statistics, 63, 1 (Feb.)
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From page 143... ...
, 103-117. 1980 "Work Expectations, Human Capital Accumulaffon, and the Wages of Young Women," Journal of Human Resources, 15, 3 (Summer)
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