Woman working on wing section, Boeing Aircraft Company. Image credit: Southern Methodist University, Central University Libraries, De Golyer Library.
Women's occupations are healthier, permit greater access to higher status networks, and involve working with better-educated people than men's occupations." - —Robert Blackburn The findings are the key result of the first systematic analysis of the different dimensions of occupational gender segregation in industrialised countries, described in a paper published today in Sociology . Occupations are segregated by gender when men or women are concentrated in different kinds of jobs. " The Dimensions of Occupational Gender Segregation in Industrial Countries " considers both economic and social factors in order to measure the extent to which the division of work along gender lines results in inequality. "Men remain on the top in terms of pay, but women, when taken as a whole, are on the top in terms of social stratification," explained Robert Blackburn, Emeritus Reader in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. "Our results suggest the pay inequality is less than often assumed, though still too high," he added. "Considering that the UK led the way with equal pay for government employees in the 1950s, progress has been slow." Contrary to popular belief, the research has found that occupational segregation - where economic opportunities are divided into "jobs for the boys" and "women's work" - does not in itself cause inequality.
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