VIRTUAL EVENT: Does Rosie like riveting? Male and female occupational choices

Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large, while many constraints believed to be responsible for these gaps seem to have weakened over time. 

As a potential solution to this puzzle, Grace Lordan explores the possibility that women and men have different tastes for the content of the work they do. 

She examines how job satisfaction and job mobility relate to different dimensions of people’s work. She labels these dimensions as: ‘people’, ‘brains’ and ‘brawn’.

Grace found that women value jobs that are relatively high on ‘brain’ and ‘people’ content and low on ‘brawn’. Men are found to be similar but have much weaker preferences. Further analyses suggest that these findings do not just reflect differences in firm-level work environments. 

Moreover, the findings are supported by a choice experiment with high school students, in which students’ hypothetical choices roughly mimic the actual behaviour of adults in the labour market. 

QSS seminar series

In this weekly Quantitative Social Science (QSS) seminar series, speakers present research that falls under the broad umbrella of quantitative social science.

Links

• QSS seminar series
• Social Research Institute
• Quantitative Social Science
• Centre for Longitudinal Studies

Image: Amy Hirschi via Unsplash