Looking inwards: towards a geographically-sensitive approach to occupational sex-segregation

In this article we question implicit assumptions in the literature and explore the issue of occupational sex-segregation from a geographical standpoint. First, we examine the degree of variation in patterns of occupational sex-segregation across regions and districts in England and Wales. Specifically, we investigate whether the proportion of workers in each occupation who are women and the Index of Dissimilarity vary across local labour markets, operationalized as Government Office Regions and Local Authority Districts. Second, we explore whether using indicators of occupational feminization calculated from aggregated national-level data biases estimates of the effect of occupational sex-segregation on wages. Results suggest that both occupational feminization and occupational dissimilarity vary widely across regions and districts, that little bias is introduced to estimates of the impact of occupational feminization on wages when indicators of sex-segregation derived at the national level are used, and that such effect varies significantly across districts.