More women than men work in higher status occupations, research shows

More women than men now work in occupations seen as higher status, research in 10 European countries, including the UK, shows.

Dr Robert Blackburn, of the University of Cambridge, analysed data on several million European workers and found that women are now more likely to work in higher-status occupations, in what he calls ìa quiet revolution in the workplaceî.

Dr Blackburn and two co-authors used official censuses and labour force surveys on how the sexes are employed, and compared them to a widely-accepted and reliable method of determining how high up the social scale an occupation is rated.

He found that in the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK, women tended to predominate in higher-status occupations. Only in Austria were men more likely to be found in these occupations. He also found the same predominance of women in higher-status occupations in the USA.

The research concentrates on a snapshot of the data and does not chart changes over time, but Dr Blackburn, Emeritus Reader in Sociology and Fellow of Clare College, said he believed there had been change in the past half-century from men tending to have higher status jobs. He said he thought this was caused by women moving away from manual labour as the number of manual jobs declines.

Dr Blackburn, working with Dr Girts Racko, also of the University of Cambridge, and Dr Jennifer Jarman, of the National University of Singapore, looked at 300 occupations. Each of these had been independently rated for its social status using a scale called CAMSIS, which is acknowledged as reliable by social scientists. Other research has shown that the jobs that are higher status also tend to be more interesting and give the employee more autonomy.

ìThe current findings indicating an advantage to women in terms of the attractiveness of occupations make clear that this is a fairly general situation, Dr Blackburn says in his paper ëGender Inequality at Work in Industrial Countriesí.

ìThere was not always this advantage to women; it is part of a significant change in industrialised societies in the last 50 years.

ìThe change results from changes in the occupational structure. Formerly women were more likely than men to be in manual occupations, but as manual work has declined, it is predominantly women who have moved into non-manual jobs, so that now it is men who are more likely than women to be manual workers.

ìInitially, in the change from manual to non-manual work, women tended to be employed in low-level non-manual occupations, especially clerical work. More recently, they have contributed to the expansion of professional employment.î

Speaking about the paper, Dr Blackburn, who is an Academician of the Academy of Social Sciences, said: ìThe findings are very important, but not widely recognised until now. A quiet revolution in the workplace means that the widespread idea that women do the low status jobs is now wrong – in fact they are more likely to be found working in the sorts of occupations that both men and women think are higher up the social scale.î

He said his research did not find that women were paid better than men – the same study found that in almost all countries men are better paid. This was largely due to the fact that occupations defined as higher status were not necessarily those that paid better. For instance heavy, dirty or dangerous manual work, done predominantly by men, was better paid than some higher status non-manual jobs of women, he said.

Also it was partly because within each occupation men tended to be better paid than women, usually because they were more senior.

The effect Dr Blackburn found was less pronounced for the UK than in the other nine countries, but was still statistically significant. By contrast the country with the greatest advantage to women was Russia, followed by Sweden.

The research also found that the advantage to women in terms of higher status work tended to be less in the richer countries - those with higher GDP per capita.

Dr Blackburn will outline his findings at a research seminar at the University of Cambridge on social stratification on September 10 .