Where Did the Men Go? An Examination of Men's and Women's Mobility Across Occupations
Coventry, Barbara Jeanne Thomas
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/72474
Description
Title
Where Did the Men Go? An Examination of Men's and Women's Mobility Across Occupations
Author(s)
Coventry, Barbara Jeanne Thomas
Issue Date
1992
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Reskin, Barbara,
Department of Study
Sociology
Discipline
Sociology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Women's Studies
Sociology, Industrial and Labor Relations
Sociology, Demography
Abstract
An unanswered question raised by women's disproportionate entry into male occupations is: "Where did the men go?" To determine which occupations men and other groups (i.e., women, white men, white women, nonwhite men, and nonwhite women) entered and left, I used data from the January 1983 Current Population Survey to calculate group-specific entry, exit, and changing participation rates. The results show that the groups generally exited, entered, and changed their participation in different occupations.
I used queueing theory to explain these different rates. Reskin and Roos (1990) argued that employers rank workers in terms of their attractiveness as employees in a labor queue and workers rank occupations in terms of their rewards and conditions in an occupation queue. To determine how queueing affects the employment outcomes of white men and women--minorities were eliminated from the multivariate analyses because of data limitations--I created models of occupational entry, exit, and participation rates that contained measures of occupations' attractiveness, opportunity measures, and age control variables. I used principle-components analyses to determine what occupations white men and women consider attractive, and thus rank high in the occupational queue. Since high scores on the components indicated that the occupations had attractive characteristics and since men and women want to work in the best job available to them (Lieberson 1980; Reskin and Roos 1990), I expected that scores on these components to affect entry and participation rates positively but negatively affect exit rates. The weighted-least-squares results provided partial support for queueing theory. Since workers can only accept or reject job offers (Reskin and Roos 1990), I expected opportunity measures--size of the occupation, occupational growth, and for women only percent female and the change in the percent female--to have a strong impact on workers' entry rates. Nearly every opportunity measure had a significant affect on the entry rates of white men and women. However, most of the components scores associated with attractive characteristics had negative effects on the changing participation rates due to the structural changes in the economy that altered the shape of the job queue.
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