Roles of Gender Essentialism in Gender Occupational Segregation: Education and Immigrant Generational Status at Work

• In Event: 30411 - Gender Inequality

Abstract

Gender essentialism is a main explanation to the persistently high gender occupational segregation. However, its limited quantitative assessments treat women and men as a monolith and fail to consider two major sociodemographic changes – educational polarization and growing immigrant labor force. Although the first-generation immigrants in Canada are highly educated, they may not be working in gender-integrated occupations to the same extent as the native-born and 1.5 generation. We examine the relationships between essentialism and gender occupational segregation by education and generational status. We ask two questions: 1) does the impact of gender essentialism on gender occupational segregation differ between those with and without university degrees?; and 2) does gender essentialism have different impacts on gender occupational segregation of first-generation immigrants from their native-born and 1.5 generation counterparts? Building on Grusky and Levanon (2016), we construct gender essentialism measures using the US O*Net, cross-walked to the 2016 Canadian census data. We then apply Baker and Cornelson (2017)’s regression techniques to measure the contributions of dimensions of gender essentialism to the gender occupational segregation level. We find the higher level of gender occupational segregation among less-educated workers is explained by feminine essentialism (emotional labor and sociability) more than masculine essentialism (e.g. physical disruption). Meanwhile, masculine/feminine essentialism equally contribute to the gender occupational segregation among university-educated workers. These results hold when we conduct separate analyses by generation status, except for the university-educated first generation. Their gender occupational segregation is notably high, and feminine essentialism contributes more to their segregation than masculine essentialism, similar to the findings from less educated workers. Highly-educated immigrant women are found in feminine occupations (e.g. early childhood educators, nurse aides) downgraded from feminine professions (e.g. schoolteachers, registered nurses) where highly-educated 1.5 generation and Canadian-born women dominate, inserted into the gendered and classed labor market.

Authors

• Lisa Kaida, McMaster University

• Monica Boyd, University of Toronto

• Lei Chai, University of Toronto

• Diana Singh, McMaster University