Is the occupational segregation we see here in the U.S. typical of what is happening internationally?
RA: It is similar to that in other countries in the sense that there is a high level of gender stereotyping in the U.S. labor market. Almost all nurses, pre-primary teachers and secretaries are women in the United States, while almost all engineers and construction workers are men. But it is different than in most other countries in two senses. First, progress in the reduction in occupational segregation since 1970 has been unusually rapid in the United States. Second, the extent to which men and women work in highly gendered occupations (which I have defined in my work as occupations where the ratio of male to female or female to male workers is at least a 4 to 1) has an usual (but not unique) pattern in the United States: the percent of men and the percent of women who work in such occupations is approximately the same. What is much more common in other countries is for the percentage of men who work in a male occupation to be much higher than the percent of women who work in a femal
