Global Patterns of Female Labor Intensity

underrepresented even in industries that are traditionally female-dominated in terms of total share of employees.

Importantly, we show that many of the female-dominated occupations are often associated with certain industries as well and that barriers to career development can be linked to the development of these occupations and industries. Careers related to highskill occupations (HSOs) are not equally divided across all industries, and the apparel industry has few career-oriented opportunities. And because of low wages in apparel manufacturing, mediocre labor market returns to gross domestic product (GDP), and therefore minimal increases in GDP per capita, the industry’s own characteristics can be a barrier (as further discussed in chapter 4).

Around the world, the distribution of males and females across industries and occupations is far from even. Men and women have traditionally gravitated toward certain industries and occupations for a range of potential reasons. Employment segregation by gender refers to the distinction between “female jobs” and “male jobs” because genderbased segmentation of labor markets results in the underrepresentation of one gender (Bergmann 1974). Industry and occupational segregation by gender means that men have historically dominated the industrial sector in every region of the world, whereas women have recently dominated the services sector in every region except South Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Middle East and North Africa (Woetzel et al. 2015).

This employment segregation is one of the primary contributors to the gender wage gap globally (Das and Kotikula 2019). In fact, jobs traditionally held by women are characterized by low earnings, low training, and few opportunities for upward mobility (Das and Kotikula 2019; Li et al. 1998; Schultz 2019).

How are the differences in the distribution of women and men across occupational categories estimated? This is typically done by using methods similar to those in income inequality measurements, such as the segregation curve derived from the Gini index (Silber 2012).1 Segregation indexes usually incorporate simple or complex forms of the proportion of males and females in the occupations analyzed, as done in Blau, Brummund, and Yung-Hsu (2012) and Gradín (2020). Most indexes measuring occupational segregation over time also account for the possible effects of occupational structure changes—a byproduct of shifts in the economy’s occupational mix due to the decline or rise of a specific sector or industry, as initially proposed by Fuchs (1975).

Because we are looking at a snapshot in time and at occupations individually, we use two simple approaches to measure industry and occupation segregation: The first is to consider the share of all working women employed in each industry. The second uses the ratio of females to males within each industry to consider the female intensity of different industries and occupations. Among manufacturing industries at the global