Occupational Segregation

Occupational Segregation Since the beginning of time, from all accounts, there has been some form of inequality between genders in society. This has become especially true in the workplace and for some people occupational segregation may be to blame. Occupational segregation is the grouping of similar jobs at similar workplaces. Not to be confused with job segregation which looks at specific jobs within specific workplaces, occupational segregation focuses on the occupation as a whole. An example of an occupation would be middle school teacher. An example of a job would be 7th grade math teacher at Champion Middle School. We use occupation segregation in research because it is more broad and easier to get details. There are over 500 occupations listed by the U.S. Census Bureau, if we broke down all middle school teachers by the subject they teach and the school they work for along with breaking down all other occupations into individual jobs, we would have too much data to process. My goal is examine what might happen if we were to eliminate occupational segregation. A popular argument that I am investigating is that by eliminating occupational segregation we will eliminate nearly all gender inequality in the workplace. After further research into the cause and effects of occupational segregation and gender inequality, I do not believe we can eliminate gender inequality in the workplace by eliminating occupational segregation. Occupation segregation exists on a global scale but for the purpose of my research I have limited my investigation to the United States. According to my reading for this lesson, in 1990 there were 56 million women working in the United States. One third of those women, roughly 19 million, worked in just 10 different occupations out of the 503 occupations listed. Occupational segregation causes three main things to happen. Occupational segregation causes what is referred to as, the promotion gap, the authority gap, and the pay gap. The