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Women edge out men to take the high-status jobs
Ellen Widdup11 Aug 2009
Woman have staged a “quiet revolution in the workplace” and now hold down more high-status jobs than men, research suggests.
A report by Cambridge University says the majority of lawyers, doctors and architects are women thanks to education improvements and a changing perception of “women's work”.
But the study, which also examines pay in 10 European countries, has found that despite this men are still being paid far more than women in the same positions.
And the report comes as the Women and Work Commission says the gender pay gap widened to
22.6 per cent last year.
In his Gender Inequality At Work In Industrial Countries, Dr Robert Blackburn analysed data on several million European workers using official
censuses and labour-force surveys and looked at patterns of employment within 300 occupations.
He said: “The findings are very important, but not widely recognised until now. A quiet revolution in the workplace means that the widespread idea that women do the low-status jobs is now wrong — they are more likely to be
found working in the sorts of occupations
that both men and women think are higher up the social scale.”
He added: “There was not always this advantage to women; it is part of a significant change in industrialised societies in the last 50 years.”
Jobs assessed were ranked according to social status, how interesting they were and how desirable they appeared to others using the Cambridge Social Interaction and Stratification Scale.
It placed professions such as medicine and law at the top of the spectrum with managers and scientists.
Research into the gender division within each field showed that more women in the “prestigious” jobs.
Dr Blackburn said dirty and dangerous manual work was usually carried out by men, adding: “Formerly women were more likely than men to be in manual occupations, but as manual
work has declined, it is predominantly women who have moved into nonmanual jobs.”
He believed the shift was also because women were now more likely to go to university than in the past.
