Does Rosie Like Riveting? Male and Female Occupational Choices

Jorn-Steffen Pischke and Grace Lordan

No 11434, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large while many of the constraints traditionally believed to be responsible for these gaps have weakened over time. Here, we explore the possibility that women and men have different tastes for the content of the work they do. We run regressions of job satisfaction on the share of males in an occupation. Overall, there is a strong negative relationship between female satisfaction and the share of males. This relationship is fairly stable across different specifications and contexts, and the magnitude of the association is not attenuated by personal characteristics or other occupation averages. Notably, the effect is muted for women but largely unchanged for men when we include three measures that proxy the content and context of the work in an occupation, which we label ‘people,’ ‘brains,’ and ‘brawn.’ These results suggest that women may care more about job content, and this is a possible factor preventing them from entering some male dominated professions. We continue to find a strong negative relationship between female satisfaction and the occupation level share of males in a separate analysis that includes share of males in the firm. This suggests that we are not just picking up differences in the work environment, although these seem to play an independent and important role as well.

Keywords: Occupational choice; Job content; Gender; Preferences (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J16 J4 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (32)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11434 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Does Rosie Like Riveting? Male and Female Occupational Choices (2022)
Working Paper: Does Rosie like riveting? Male and female occupational choices (2022)
Working Paper: Does Rosie like riveting? Male and female occupational choices (2016)
Working Paper: Does Rosie like riveting? Male and female occupational choices (2016)
Working Paper: Does Rosie like riveting? Male and female occupational choices (2016)
Working Paper: Does Rosie Like Riveting? Male and Female Occupational Choices (2016)
Working Paper: Does Rosie Like Riveting? Male and Female Occupational Choices (2016)
Working Paper: Does Rosie Like Riveting? Male and Female Occupational Choices (2016)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:11434

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP11434

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().