Fall 2022

Occupational gender segregation has been shown to constitute a large portion of the gender wage gap, but there are hidden forces at play when one considers intersection of organizations and occupations that elucidate other mechanisms that shape wage gaps and inequalities in opportunities across genders. Discrimination can take place directly, with preferential hiring for certain jobs or pay discrimination within jobs, but allocative forces that match workers to jobs also produce pay gaps. While many of these mechanisms have been explored using aggregated data in white-collar settings, there has been no successful exploration of such forces at the level of detailed occupations, and a specific attention to allocation of workers is lacking. Using a longitudinal perspective with data on US federal civil servants covering nearly 50 years of workers, this paper investigates the role of differential allocation of workers by gender---segregation between jobs, ranks, and agencies---and specifically the demand-side restructuring of occupations within workplaces in the production of the gender wage gap.