Publication type
Journal Article
Authors
Publication date
September 16, 2021
Summary:
Occupational segregation and pay gaps by gender remain large, while many of the constraints traditionally believed to be responsible for these gaps seem to have weakened over time. We explore the possibility that women and men have different tastes for the content of the work that they do. We relate job satisfaction and job mobility to measures that proxy for the content of the work in an occupation, which we label ‘people’, ‘brains’ and ‘brawn’. The results suggest that women value jobs high on ‘people’ content and low on ‘brawn’. Men care about job content in a similar fashion, but have much weaker preferences. High school students show similar preferences in a discrete choice experiment and indicate that they make their choices based mainly on preferences for the work itself. We argue that the more pronounced preferences of women can account for occupational sorting, which often leads them into careers with large pay penalties for interruptions due to childbearing.
Published in
Economica
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1111/ecca.12390
ISSN
130427
Subjects
Notes
Online Early
Open Access
© 2021 The Authors. Economica published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of London School of Economics and Political Science
This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
#546961