Do occupations confer equal prestige on female and male incumbents?

Abstract While common measures of occupational prestige target shared beliefs about occupations at the aggregate level, little is known about whether these apply equally across potentially different incumbents of the same occupation. We address this gap by asking whether occupations confer the same prestige to female and male incumbents. Therein, occupational prestige provides an empirical lens on the evaluation of gendered labor market positions, allowing us to test theories of the devaluation of women’s work and perceptions of incumbents in gender-atypical occupations. We conducted a survey experiment that signals occupational incumbents’ gender via grammatically gendered occupational titles in German and collected about 64,000 prestige ratings for 106 occupations that cover half of the employed workforce. Findings indicate less prestige assigned to feminine compared to masculine occupational titles, suggesting that female incumbents face a prestige disadvantage. This applies foremost to male-dominated occupations, supporting theories on the devaluation of women’s work among them. However, these within–occupation gender prestige gaps are relatively small compared to prestige variation between occupations and unlikely to undermine established prestige measures in most empirical applications. These insights shed light on how gender and occupations relate in conveying prestige and contribute to the methodology of surveying occupational prestige, especially when faced with grammatically gendered languages.