Occupational segregation by gender is a lengthy way to say that there are male- and female-dominated jobs. Who do you picture in your mind when you hear that someone is a pipe fitter? Childcare worker? Carpenter? Nurses’ aide? Exactly. A lot of my work to date has been on the things that lead to occupational segregation by gender and the economic ramifications of it.
From 1999 to 2003, I evaluated two federal programs designed to increase the number of women in craft occupations and skilled trades, which resulted in my 2004 book, Breaking Out of the Pink Collar Ghetto: Policy Solutions for Non-College Women (M.E. Sharpe)
In 2004, I worked with the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD), a seven-county governmental body, to develop their workforce diversity plan and investigate the institutional and personal networks used by job seekers and public sector employers in selected technical fields including water quality monitoring and construction inspection.
At present, I am expanding my research on non-traditional occupations for women to include highly-skilled engineering and scientific fields like physics, mathematics, and certain engineering fields. In my research on crafts and skilled trades, I found the lack of communication and information networks to be very important in explaining women’s under representation in those fields. Expanding this work to occupations that require many years of formal education and examining women's job search networks will help me to determine the extent to which my earlier findings can be generalized across occupation types and skill sets.