Comparing occupational segregation in Great Britain and the United States: the benefits of using a multi-group measure of segregation

摘要

The main aim of this article has been to demonstrate how the use of a multiple group measure of segregation can take us beyond a restrictive focus on segregation between men and women and can produce a more nuanced analysis that takes account of the importance of part-time employment within the labour market. This is not to suggest that the use of Theil's H represents some kind of panacea to the problems inherent in trying to summarize and describe occupational segregation. It Would be unrealistic to expect any single summary measure of segregation to capture the complexities of occupational segregation (Chang, 2000). Given that the classification of occupational groups used here has over 100 categories and there are three groups defined in terms of sex and part-time/full-time Working hours what is being attempted is to summarize a matrix with over 300 elements using just three figures (i.e. the decomposition of Theil's H as shown in Table 3). One obvious shortcoming of the approach discussed in this article, for example, is that it does not distinguish between vertical and horizontal components of segregation (Blackburn et al., 2001). However, as previous authors have emphasized there is no one measure or index that can capture all of the dimensions of segregation (Lieberson, 1980; Charles and Grusky, 1995). Rather, this multiple-group measure of segregation should be understood as a useful additional tool to complement the range of indices currently used in research on segregation.