While the gender pay gap continues to decline, gender occupational segregation in the labor market has changed little in recent decades. Research on sex differences in humans provides "lab evidence" of gender differences in sensory, motor and spatial aptitudes. We provide evidence that these skills, as captured by DOT codes, strongly predict the occupational choices of men and women, in the directions indicated by this research. We estimate that if selection on these skills were eliminated, the Duncan index of gender based occupational segregation would be roughly 23 percent lower than its actual level, in both 1970 and 2012. In recent years, occupational selection on these aptitudes works, on average, to lower the gender earnings gap.
↧