The intergenerational sources of the U-turn in gender segregation

Significance

The US workplace is hypersegregated into two worlds, a “men’s world” comprising occupations with very few women, and a “women’s world” comprising occupations with very few men. Although many commentators have argued that this gender divide would gradually wither away, in fact the workplace suddenly stopped integrating 20 y ago. By building a model that combines mobility and segregation processes, we show that the stall was partly driven by a change in how fathers transmit occupations. When daughters streamed into the economy, fathers began to pass on male-typed occupations disproportionately to their sons, whereas mothers remained steadfastly gender-neutral. This son-biased shift, which cut off the integrative trend, suggests a role for family-centered interventions that target where the gender revolution faltered.

Abstract

In the early 1970s, the balkanization of the US labor market into “men’s occupations” and “women’s occupations” began to unravel, as women entered the professions and other male-typed sectors in record numbers. This decline in gender segregation continued on for several decades but then suddenly stalled at the turn of the century and shows no signs of resuming. Although the stall is itself undisputed, its sources remain unclear. Using nearly a half-century of data from the General Social Survey, we show that a resurgence in segregation-inducing forms of intergenerational transmission stands behind the recent stall. Far from serving as impartial conduits, fathers are now disproportionately conveying male-typed occupations to their sons, whereas mothers are effectively gender-neutral in their transmission outcomes. This segregative turn among fathers accounts for 47% of the stall in the gender segregation trend (between 2000 and 2018), while the earlier integrative turn among fathers accounts for 34% of the initial downturn in segregation (between 1972 and 1999). It follows that a U-turn in intergenerational processes lies behind the U-turn in gender segregation.