How Gender Segregation in Higher Education Contributes to Gender Segregation in the U.S. Labor Market

Abstract

What is the relationship between gender segregation in higher education and gender segregation in the labor market? Using Fossett’s (2017) difference-of-means method for calculating segregation indices and data from the American Community Survey, we show that approximately 36% of occupational segregation among college-edu­cated work­ers is asso­ci­ated with gen­der seg­re­ga­tion across 173 fields of study, and roughly 64% reflects gen­der seg­re­ga­tion within fields. A decom­po­si­tion anal­y­sis shows that fields con­trib­ute to occu­pa­tional seg­re­ga­tion mainly through endow­ment effects (men’s and women’s uneven dis­tri­bu­tion across fields) than through the coef­fi­cient effects (gender differences in the likelihood of entering a male-dominated occupation from the same field). Endowment effects are highest in fields strongly linked to the labor mar­ket, suggesting that edu­ca­tional seg­re­ga­tion among fields in which grad­u­ates tend to enter a limited set of occupations is particularly consequential for occupational seg­re­ga­tion. Within-field occu­pa­tional seg­re­ga­tion is higher among heavily male-­ dom­i­nated fields than other fields, but it does not vary sys­tem­at­i­cally by fields’ STEM sta­tus or field–occu­pa­tion link­age strength. Assuming the rela­tion­ship between field segregation and occupational segregation is at least partly causal, these results imply that inte­grat­ing higher edu­ca­tion (e.g., by increas­ing women’s rep­re­sen­ta­tion in STEM majors) will reduce but not elim­i­nate gen­der seg­re­ga­tion in labor mar­kets.