When All Assistants Are Women, Are All Women Assistants? Gender Inequality and the Gender Composition of Support Roles

A growing literature examines whether women’s integration into management jobs erodes gender stereotypes and gender inequality. However, this literature neglects the other side of the status coin—women’s continued predominance in low-level support jobs. I theorize that what people see when they “look down” the occupational structural is more critical to the creation of status beliefs than what they see when they “look up,” and test this theory using matched employer-employee data from Japan. I find that, adjusting for job type and human capital, the gender pay gap is nearly three times greater in companies where subordinate jobs are female dominated. This theory provides new ways to understand the “stalled gender revolution” in the United States, Japan, and beyond.