Why do many occupations show a gender bias? Yesterday we had a question about the alleged underpayment of women in work, asking why employers would hire fewer cheaper female workers and would instead hire a larger number of expensive male workers. A large amount of discussion ensued.
I'd like to approach the same topic from a different angle.
Without doubt many occupations show a gender bias, and across the board it is apparent that women are more concentrated in occupations which attract lower hourly pay.
What are the economic reasons why, when encountering low pay (or anticipating it at the start of their careers), women should not simply respond to economic incentives, and choose to transfer to higher-paid occupations to increase their earnings?
I should say pre-emptively that I'm not satisfied with ideas that merely may explain the effect, as yesterday's question produced a proliferation of rationalisations and claims that lacked rigour.
I'd prefer to see an explanation that attempts to be comprehensive, or supports contentious claims (such as those about women's productivity) with research.
I should say pre-emptively that I'm not satisfied with ideas that merely may explain the effect, as yesterday's question produced a proliferation of rationalisations and claims that lacked rigour.


I'd prefer to see an explanation that attempts to be comprehensive, or supports contentious claims (such as those about women's productivity) with research.

Your question and the yesterday's one are contentious even in the literature, which means there is no consensus among the economists and no one can give an answer that satisfies everybody. Given the complexity of these questions, they can involve and interact with many different issues, all of which matter to some extent. Even in the literature, the common way is to attack them from one specific perspective rather than to offer a &quot;comprehensive&quot; answer. Also a convincing explanation usually requires careful data analysis, qualified modelling and many robustness checks, which suits more to an academic paper rather than to an answer in this forum.
However, I agree with you that we should avoid rationalisations and claims that lack rigour and the support of academic references. In the comments of this question someone has already mentioned that some recent papers argue that commuting requirement can be one potential reason. I thus list some recent papers that suggest other deep-in-root causes below.
Adda, Dustmann, Stevens 2017 finds that different occupations can diverge in the amenity &quot;child raising value&quot; and in the loss of accumulated skills when interrupting work careers. Given the fertility consideration, women would thus more likely to choose the occupations that have lower wage growth.
Occupation choice is also related with education choice. Women's underrepresentation in the math-intensive fields (i.e. STEM fileds) translates into their underrepresentation not only in high-paying occupations but also in occupations where the gender wage gap within the occupation is particularly small. A survey paper by McNally 2020 reviews many arguments behind this gender differences in tertiary education.
Hsieh, Hurst, Jones, Klenow 2019 studies the roles that the discrimination in the labor market, the barriers to forming human capital, and the differences in preferences or social norms play in individuals' occupation choice. They find that the improvement in the discrimination in forming human capital is the most important driver behind the increased participation of women in high-wage occupations in recent decades.
In additional to typical economics reasoning, Bertrand 2020 suggests that endogenous preferences and self-fulfilling prophecies caused by gender stereotypes can be important for the low share of women in STEM careers and occupations. Also, Grosjean &amp; Khattar 2019 shows that cultural persistency can affect womens' occupational choices.