Jumping to male-dominated occupations: A novel way to reduce gender wage gap for Chinese women

TL;DR

This study reveals that in China, occupations with more men tend to have smaller gender wage gaps, suggesting women could reduce wage disparities by entering male-dominated fields, despite persistent discrimination.

Contribution

The paper uncovers the counterintuitive relationship between occupational gender composition and wage gaps in China, proposing a novel strategy for women to narrow wage disparities.

Findings

Higher proportion of men in an occupation correlates with smaller gender wage gap.

Occupational segregation in China is relatively low overall and regionally.

Inter-occupational discrimination is less significant than intra-occupational discrimination.

Abstract

Occupational segregation is widely considered as one major reason leading to the gender discrimination in labor market. Using large-scale Chinese resume data of online job seekers, we uncover an interesting phenomenon that occupations with higher proportion of men have smaller gender wage gap measured by the female-male ratio on wage. We further show that the severity of occupational segregation in China is low both overall and regionally, and the inter-occupational discrimination is much smaller than the intra-occupational discrimination. That is to say, Chinese women do not face large barriers when changing their occupations. Accordingly, we suggest Chineses women a new way to narrow the gender wage gap: to join male-dominated occupations. Meanwhile, it is worth noticing that although the gender wage gap is smaller in male-dominated occupations, it does not mean that the gender discrimination is smaller there.