Trends in Race/Sex Occupational Inequality: Conceptual and Measurement Issues

This paper takes an important step in assessing progress in eradicating gender, race, and ethnic employment discrimination by developing a new conceptualization and a related measure of occupational inequality. Additionally, a method is developed to decompose change in this measure into four sources: (1) change in the race/sex composition within occupations; (2) shifts in the race/sex composition of the labor force; (3) transformation in the occupational structure; and (4) interaction of these three factors. An analysis of U.S. census and current population survey data demonstrates the empirical advantages of this measure, and shows that race/sex occupational inequality substantially declined during the 1960s and 1970s. However, between 1980 and 1989, this downward trend diminished substantially.