THE ANALYSIS OF OCCUPATIONAL GENDER SEGREGATION OVER TIME AND PLACE -CONSIDERATIONS OF MEASUREMENT AND SOME NEW EVIDENCE

Despite the importance of occupational segregation as an area of inves tigation concerned with understanding women's employment status, pay l evels, and promotional prospects during the last 20 years, there has b een relatively little attention paid to the problems of trying to meas ure segregation levels in quantitative data. This paper argues that th ere are serious measurement problems which it illustrates by showing t hat two of the principal indices, the widely-used Index of Dissimilari ty and the OECD's WE Index are highly flawed and produce unreliable re sults. It demonstrates the importance of these deficiencies using cros s-national data from 9 countries for the period 1970-1982. The paper i ntroduces a new way of analysing the form of these indices in the Basi c Segregation Table, which is a 2 x 2 table of gendered occupations by sex. The paper suggests a new approach to measuring occupational segr egation which provides more consistent and valid results. This is call ed Marginal Matching. The paper ends with an analysis of occupational gender segregation in England and Wales from 1951 to 1981. It conclude s that, in contrast to research claims to date, the trend in segregati on over this period is one of overall stability.