29 April 2010

Much of the research into patterns of gender segregation in hierarchies is focused on “who gets to the top”. But the numbers of people working at “lower” ends of the hierarchy are greater and just as revealing. With the advance of the knowledge economy and the more widespread use of ICTs in employment, the physical differences that underlie traditional distributions of labour between the sexes are less of a divisive factor for attributing work opportunities.

The UNECE database harbours sex-disaggregated labour data that are crossed by both occupation¹ and economic sector. Statistics on clerical occupations, which represent about 8% of full-time equivalent employment, are available for most of these countries.

Occupational and sectoral gender patterns are marked across the region. Men are still much more likely than women to be working in craft and related trades, as plant and machine operators and assemblers, legislators and as professionals in most economic sectors (except services). Some economic sectors, notably industry and finance, provide work for far more men than women.

The odds ratio tells us in simple terms how many times more likely one sex is than the other to be working in certain occupations within specific economic sectors. In this case, where the odds ratio is higher than 1, it signifies that, within that sector, women are more likely than men to be working in clerical occupations. As the graph shows, throughout all sectors, even in industry and finance, the occupants of clerical posts are invariably more likely to be women than men in the UNECE region.

¹ Using the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) and the International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC)

Source: UNECE Statistical Database.

Note: *An Odds Ratio of 1 means that the odds of women are the same as those of men