The Intersection of Race/Ethnicity and Gender in Occupational Segregation

In this article, we examine changes in the types of occupations that members of various racial/ethnic-gender groups have entered. We are interested in two trends that we believe may have contributed to differences in occupational concentration: budget reductions and policy changes in Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) enforcement procedures, and the continuing increases in women’s educational attainment. Using whites, African Americans, and Hispanics in our analysis, we evaluate race and ethnic differences by gender, and gender differences by race and ethnicity; thus, we pay particular attention to the intersection of race/ethnicity and gender in these processes. Our results suggest that white men have maintained their advantage in the occupational hierarchy in the period under investigation, and that white women have made more progress than any other group. For women, 32 INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY educational investment reaps rewards, although these benefits continue to be unequal. At the same time, the rewards accruing to white men, above and beyond the additive effects of their race and gender, have not changed over time; white women’s progress has not intruded on this. Instead, white women’s progress is a result of changes in two additive effects: the cost of being female has declined over time and the white advantage has increased. To the extent that changes in EEOC policies have had a negative impact on occupational desegregation, the impact is racialized but not gendered. Occupational gender segregation in the United States has been extensively studied and researchers have recently turned their attention to occupational race and ethnic segregation as well. Kaufman (2002), for example, found that almost one-third of black or white workers would have to change occupations to achieve full integration, while Reskin, McBrier, and Kmec (1999) noted that, proportionately, minorities were substantially underrepresented in over half the establishments studied by Kalleberg et al. (1996). Moreover, Tomaskovic-Devey et al. (2006) and Tomaskovic-Devey and Stainback (2007) demonstrated that workplace desegregation for blacks and Hispanics in 2002 remained at 1980 levels. Available research, though scanty, has also found occupational race and ethnic segregation within genders and occupational gender segregation within races and ethnicities. Reskin and Cassirer (1996) and Catanzarite (2003), for example, found much racial and/or ethnic segregation among female workers, demonstrating that the widely used measure, percentage of women, masks very important racial and ethnic differences (Catanzarite 2003). Finally, Jacobs and Blair-Loy (1996) found high levels of gender segregation among African Americans. Although these findings suggest that race, ethnicity, and gender can interact in complex ways, we know very little about how they intersect within the occupational structure. We do know, however, that both occupational race/ethnic and gender segregation are consequential. A number of studies have documented their effect on authority hierarchies (Elliot and Smith 2004; Kluegel 1978; McGuire and Reskin 1993; Smith and Elliot 2002), and occupational gender segregation has consistently been found to affect wages (Cohen and Huffman 2003; Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman 1999; England 1992; Huffman and Velasco 1997; Reskin and Roos 1990). Research has also demonstrated that it contributes to gender inequality in a variety of countries (Aisenbrey and Bruckner 2008; Evertsson et al. 2009; Grusky et al. 2010; Occhionera and Nocenzi 2009; Semyonov and Herring 2007; Smyth and Steinmetz 2008). Although evidence is mixed on whether occupational race/ethnic segregation