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Title: The Cultural Devaluation of Feminized Work: The Evolution of Occupational Prestige and Gender Typing in the United States, 1900-2019

Citation Type: Miscellaneous

Publication Year: 2023

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DOI: 10.31235/OSF.IO/8Q3CA

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Abstract: Previous research on job devaluation typically evaluates the potential wage declines associated with a significant inflow of women into an occupation, while results have been mixed. Few studies, however, examine the cultural mechanism central to the thesis, where an occupation’s prestige changes in response to the dynamics of its cultural association with women. This paper proposes a new semantic approach to trace the devaluation process in American culture, where occupation titles appear in scholarly and public discourses with varied semantic proximity to gender- and prestige-signaling phrases over time. Decade-specific occupation embedding (1900- 2019) from 127 billion words of American English across genres and a novel decom- position of fixed-effects estimation show a latent cultural bias against women’s work, such that an occupation’s prestige declines when it becomes increasingly stereotyped as a female job. Penalties appear throughout the period, with the largest effects found in lower-income occupations; most high-income occupations, despite experiencing large increases in female share in recent years, are persistently stereotyped as male professions without a significant prestige loss. In total, the cultural mechanism of devaluation accounts for 18.2–21.1% of the observed negative link between the changes of an occupation’s actual female share and prestige.

Url: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/8q3ca/

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Authors: Jiang, Wenhao

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Data Collections: IPUMS USA

Topics: Gender, Labor Force and Occupational Structure

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