Does the Gender Composition of an Occupation affect Wages?
Nicola Fuchs-Schundeln, Franziska Riepl, and Alexandra Spitz-Oener
August 2025
In recent decades, progress in reducing the gender pay gap has slowed down or even stopped in many industrialized countries. Based on the observation that women continue to be overrepresented in low-paying occupations and men in high-paying occupations, many believe that reducing the degree of occupational segregation is necessary to reduce the gender wage gap further. This widely held view is also re ected in recent policies that aim to increase female labor force participation in highly-paying male-dominated felds, such as STEM.
Proponents of those policies highlight that women would catch up to men’s higher wages by moving into those highly-paying occupations, thereby reducing the overall gender pay gap. In this paper, we provide causal evidence that an increase in the female share in an occupation leads to lower wages for men and, to a lesser extent, for women. We establish causality by exploiting a gendered labor supply shock caused by German reunification.
Overall, the results suggest that decreasing occupational segregation might be effective in closing the gender wage gap. However, the mechanism we identify is quite different than the one that is typically discussed. We show that in the process of reducing occupational
segregation, wages change. In occupations in which the female share increases, wages decline in particular for men, which contributes to a reduction in the gender wage gap if occupational sorting decreases. We show that these adverse effects of increasing female shares are pervasive and all-encompassing, and not driven by changes in skill requirements or the task content in occupations. Our combined results are consistent with the \devaluation hypothesis» put forth in the sociology literature. They also help explain the reluctance of men to have women enter their occupation, as put forward in the \pollution» theory.
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