Gender Differences in Job Requirements: Change Within Careers and Across Cohorts
A recent
study published in
Human Resource Management (HRM) examined differences in jobs held by men and women based on the job requirements of individual employees' positions - knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). These standard human resources measures, generated by job analyses, were not previously used in research on gender differences in career advancement. The study followed the first ten years of careers of two cohorts of university graduates who entered the post-college labour market in 1994 and 2009, respectively, using nationally representative data from the US Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network database. The findings reveal that in both cohorts, women occupied jobs with lower job requirements relative to men. Interestingly, the gender gap in job requirements followed a different trajectory across cohorts: it grew over the course of individuals' careers for the first cohort (1994–2003) but contracted for the second cohort (2009–2018). The study also found that women in the second cohort received a salary premium for social skills that was greater than what men received. A significant finding of the study is that the difference in pay between men and women is much bigger than the difference in KSAs required for them to do a job, meaning that the gender pay gap cannot be explained by gender differences in KSAs. The use of KSAs to investigate gender differences in career advancement of individuals in an inter-organisational context takes the study beyond the limitations of single-firm studies that have primarily dominated research in this area, and, as such, represents the study's unique substantial contribution to our knowledge of gender differences in career advancement and contemporary careers in general.
To find out more:
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Shaun Pichler, Ph.D.
Co-Editor-in-Chief, HRM
Professor
Department of Management
California State University, Fullerton
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