Lee’s Blog 12

Occupational segregation exists for several reasons. One reason is that, no matter how hard we try to make the genders equal and allow both men and women to work in the same jobs totally across the board, I don’t think it will ever happen. That is not to say that it could not happen. I just don’t believe it will. That is very sad. If a woman wants to enter a male dominated occupation, or vice versa, they should have that opportunity. It is extremely encouraging to see how many occupations both men and women do work in side by side today. If one were to look back, say thirty years ago, you would never see a woman riding a fire truck as a firefighter. You would never have seen a man working as a secretary. Today, you see both of these occurring. I, in fact, am a male secretary and love this line of work. Consider the day when you would not have seen a female attorney. Now there are numerous female attorneys.

Occupational segregation, while it seems to have been around since the beginning of time, can be cyclical. There was a time when clerical workers were all male. Then it cycled around to where most clerical workers were women. Now the cycle has begun to swing around again to where men are entering clerical work more and more.

Social and institutional factors contribute to this problem in several ways. Even before a baby is born, we get everything pink for them if they are a girl and everything blue for them if they are a boy. This carries on after birth, thereby reinforcing the gender segregation.

According to the YWCA’s article “Increasing Women’s Incomes” Non-Traditional Training and Employment Fact Sheet,” occupational segregation plays a huge role in the number of women that live below the poverty level[i]. This same report states that, in 2002, women earned only 77 cents of every dollar a man earned. This is preposterous! Even worse is the fact that African American women earned less than that and Latinas earned even less than African Americans.

Women tend to earn more when working in a male dominated occupation than if they were working in a female dominated occupation. However, as we have already stated, they do not make as much as men do in these same occupations.

If men lose by women entering their male dominated occupations, it would only be in that there may not be as many positions to go around. It is obvious from the figures cited above from the YWCA article that men do not lose wages. What needs to happen is women’s wages need to increase to match the men’s wages. I would throw out a “monkey wrench” here from my personal experience. As I already said, I am a male working in the clerical field. When a male enters a
female dominated occupation, they do not earn as much as the female, at least I didn’t.

[i] www.ywca.org, “Increasing Women’s Incomes: Non-Traditional Training and Employment Fact Sheet” in Eliminating Racism, empowering Women.