Revise and Resubmit, American Sociological Review

The “gender revolution” is now a half-century old and yet the workplace is still extremely segregated. We cast new light on the sources of extreme sex segregation by developing a model resting on the twin principles of queuing and gender essentialism. Using data from the O*NET archive, we show that much male-biased queuing remains after the physical, cognitive, and interactional forms of essentialism are exhaustively operationalized. We also find, however, that essentialism is an important force behind segregation, that the physical and interactional forms of segregation are especially strong, that the physical form of essentialism is one of the few examples of female-advantaging segregation, and that essentialism takes on a fractal structure that generates much micro-segregation at detailed occupational levels. We conclude by discussing how essentialist processes account for the intransigence of occupational sex segregation.