Occupational Segregation

In the business world, gender discrimination undoubtedly is a hot topic as well as a tough problem. Such kind of discrimination leads to an unbalanced distribution of occupations in the workplace. Occupational segregation mainly involves channeling men and women into different occupations, or disproportionately into different occupations, or at different levels within the same industry. People tend to classify occupations to men’s jobs and women’s jobs based upon the job nature, the demographic characteristics and the previous decision-making. And such occupational segregation is most likely caused by gender-based discrimination.

The statistical data collected from the surveys can powerfully demonstrate the idea of occupational segregation. In the United States, 70 percent of the employees in the human resources department are females. According to “Proportion female for selected occupations US, 2006”, up to 88.9 percent of nursing jobs are taken up by women. If we take a look at the engineering or technological industries, the ratio will be totally different. Only 5.8 percent of mechanical engineers are females. From 2015 Stack Overflow survey result, it shows that 92.1 percent of the software developers are identified as male; only 7.9 percent of respondents are identified as female. Based on these statistical data, we can obviously find that there are respectively dominant fields for men and women. Take human resources as a typical instance. People constantly believe that women have the nature of caring and developing people; they are good at communicating with others as well as coordinating with interpersonal relationships compared with men. Thus they argue that HR is simply more suited for females.