Reducing Sex Bias in Jobs

Sex segregation on the job has declined in the last decade, thanks to increasing opportunities for women. But it is far from eliminated, according to a major new report from a panel set up by the National Academy of Sciences. It won’t be reduced further without more active intervention by the federal government and corporate leaders passing the word that discrimination wastes human resources while it is inherently unfair.

Without sex segregation that channels women into low-paying job categories in which they predominate, women would earn 75 cents for every dollar that a man earns, rather than the well known 59 cents. The gap would be even smaller if there weren’t sex segregation even within job categories, says the report issued by a committee of the National Research Council, which is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

The panel, headed by Alice S. Ilchman, president of Sarah Lawrence College, found that almost half of all employed women work in occupations that are at least 80% female, and that slightly more than half of all men work in jobs that are 80% male. The report found less sex segregation among younger workers, with women in their 20s being more likely to work as engineers or administrators. Women have also made gains in once-traditionally male fields like bus driving, selling real estate and delivering mail. Those are fields in which they can work more on their own rather than face even unconscious discrimination from men unaccustomed to working with women “who simply may be uncertain about how to behave,” the report says.

Sex segregation has many causes, the report says. Many cultural traditions place more responsibility for child-rearing with women, and have reduced women’s employment opportunities. Society has kept men and women from working together in some jobs, presumably to protect one sex or the other from corruption. Parents and teachers often educate girls for roles different from those of boys, or hold different expectations.

Despite the many factors at play, the committee concluded that legal barriers and discrimination have played the largest role. Women’s free choice in the open job market is not the main reason they are concentrated in a few occupations. Restriction, not choice, “plays the more important role,” the report says.

The restrictions have been broken down directly by passing laws against discrimination and enforcing them, and indirectly “by fostering attitude changes among both employers and workers about what kinds of work should be available to women,” the report says. “Evidence that enforcement works demonstrates that behavior and beliefs are not immutable.” But the committee expressed concern that the decline in enforcement since 1981 “will make further positive change less likely.”

The committee’s suggestions to try to achieve that change are not new, but they should be heeded. It recommended vigorous federal enforcement of laws that are already on the books, improvement in efforts to reduce sex stereotyping in education and job training, use of more varied referral sources in job recruiting and provision of more abundant and improved child care. Without bringing up politically loaded phrases, it also suggested the simple expedient of raising the pay in jobs dominated by women to curb the effects of discrimination.

The recommendations are really not as modest as the committee contends. They could end wasteful economic practices, curb financial losses to women and their families, and buoy the spirits of men and women alike. That beats rigidly adhering to the status quo.