Occupational gender segregation: Index measurement and econometric modeling

Empirical studies of gender segregation by occupation must be founded on ri gorous measurement procedures. There appears to be a consensus that any ind ex used in the analysis of time-series or international cross-section emplo yment data must be either margin-free or decomposable to yield a margin-fre e component. On the other hand, Charles and Grusky (1995) advocate the use of multiplicative log models from which a margin-free odds ratio can be der ived. In this paper I contrast the construction and interpretation of the i ndex of dissimilarity and the Karmel-MacLachlan index with the multiplicati ve modeling of gender segregation and the associated log index.