Generational Differences in Female Occupational Attainment-Have the 1970's Changed Women's Opportunities?
The issue of equal pay for comparable work has in recent years come to the forefront of debate in the political arena. Crucial to estimating the potential consequences of comparable worth legislation is an understanding of the causes of sex differences in occupations. Earlier studies have found evidence that sex differences in labor force attachment may explain sex differences in occupations. (See Solomon Polachek, 1977, 1979, 1981; and my 1984 paper.) However, Paula England (1982) and Mary Corcoran et al. (1983) find that women with high labor force attachment are no more likely than other women to be in male occupations. This result suggests that when choosing occupations, women may face constraints in the form either of direct labor market discrimination preventing them from entering male occupations, or of a socialization process through which women and men acquire different tastes for occupations. Virtually all the evidence discussed above is derived from data on women who came of age in the late 1940's and early to mid-1950's. This paper seeks to determine whether young women today continue to face the same constraints. To do so, the structure of occupational attainment for two cohorts of women is compared. The older cohort, 2894 women taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Mature Women, was born in the decade before World War 11 (1929-1937), and the younger cohort, 2632 women taken from the National Longitudinal Survey of Young Women, was born in the decade following (1944-52). The paper compares the two groups when each cohort was aged 30-38: in 1967 for the older cohort and in 1982 for the younger cohort. Thus, the observations on the two groups are separated by the crucial decade of the 1970's when the effects of equal employment opportunity legislation and the women's movement are thought to have taken hold. Section I compares the two cohorts and finds that the younger women are more attached to the labor force and enter more skilled, less female occupations than their older counterparts. Section II attempts to determine the underlying reasons for the younger women's increased occupational attainment.
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