"Devaluation of female occupations or devaluation of women within occupations?" : a longitudinal analysis on the relationship of occupational gender segregation and wage trends in West Germany

Abstract

"The West German labor market is characterized by stable occupational gender segregation, which is often taken as explanation for the lower wages of women at the individual level. However, the causal direction of this relationship at the occupational level has not been analyzed for West Germany yet. Thus, we explore whether a rising share of women per occupation leads to decreasing wages, which would point at a devaluation of female tasks, or whether a causal effect cannot be found anymore, because the relationship between occupational wage level and women's share, which developed over time, continues to exist until today. We test these assumptions using an occupational panel data set, which we generated from the Sample of Integrated Labour Market Biographies (SIAB) for the years 1976 to 2010, by means of panel models with fixed occupation effects. Our estimations show that an increasing share of women per occupation indeed leads to a decreasing overall wage level. However, this is not due to the fact that the wages of both women and men in this occupation are declining, but that more women with constantly lower earnings are working in this occupation. These results indicate a social devaluation of all employed women beyond the gender typing of the occupation they are working in." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Hausmann, A., Kleinert, C. & Leuze, K. (2015): "Entwertung von Frauenberufen oder Entwertung von Frauen im Beruf?". Eine Längsschnittanalyse zum Zusammenhang von beruflicher Geschlechtersegregation. In: Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, Vol. 67, No. 2, p. 217-242. DOI:10.1007/s11577-015-0304-y