The Effect of Occupational Sex-Composition on Earnings: Job-Specialization, Sex-Role Attitudes and the Division of Domestic Labour in Spain

Abstract

Important theoretical controversies remain unresolved in the literature on occupational sex-segregation and the gender wage gap. These controversies can be summarized as a debate between cultural-socialization arguments and economic or rational-action theories of specialization. The article discusses these theories in detail and carries out a preliminary test of the relative explanatory performance of some of their most consequential predictions. This is done by drawing on the Spanish sample of the second round of the European Social Survey (ESS). Empirical results suggest that the effect of occupational sex-segregation on wages could be explicable by workers’ sex-role attitudes, their relative input in domestic production and the job-specific human-capital requirements of their jobs. Of these three factors, job-specialization seems clearly the most important one.