At the other side of occupational sex segregation. Men in female occupations and women in male occupations

Abstract

This paper is derived from a more extensive investigation into different characteristics of genderrelated occupations as compared to gender-mixed occupations (Ibáñez, 2008). In the present study, we observe that men and women are treated differently depending on whether they are in a maledominated or female-dominated occupation. Secondly, we analyse the extent to which opting for gender-segregated occupations may be more or less deleterious depending on the gender of the employee. For this study we used multinomial and binomial logit regression to analyse three databases: the 2001 Census, the Labour Force Survey (EPA-02) and the Survey on Salary Structures (EES-02). The results show that, in general, women in male job environments and men in female environments are better situated and receive higher labour rewards than wage-earners in own-sex occupations. However, raising the educational level required for certain jobs, as well as intervention in the public sector where women tend to occupy male occupations, seem to be two ways of counteracting this phenomenon.