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Gender, Occupation Choice and the Risk of Death at Work

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Author Info
Thomas DeLeire
Helen Levy

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Abstract

Women and men tend to work in different occupations. Although a great deal of research has been devoted to the measurement of trends in occupation segregation by gender, very little work has focused on the underlying job choice process that generates this segregation. What makes men and women choose the jobs they do? Using employment data from the 1995 - 1998 Current Population Surveys and data on occupational injuries and deaths from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we estimate conditional logit models of occupation choice as a function of the risk of work-related death and other job characteristics. Our results suggest that women choose safer jobs than men. Within gender, we find that single moms or dads are most averse to fatal risk, presumably because they have the most to lose. The effect of parenthood on married women is larger than its effect on married men, which is consistent with the idea that men's contributions to raising children are more fully insured than women's. Overall, men and women's different preferences for risk can explain about one-quarter of the fact that men and women choose different occupations.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 8574.

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Date of creation: Nov 2001
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:8574

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J2 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demand and Supply of Labor

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  1. Siow, Aloysius, 1984. "Occupational Choice under Uncertainty," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 52(3), pages 631-45, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  2. Robertson, D. & Symons, J., 1988. "The Occupational Choice Of British Children," Papers 325, London School of Economics - Centre for Labour Economics.
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  3. Francine D. Blau & Lawrence M. Kahn, 2000. "Gender Differences in Pay," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 14(4), pages 75-99, Fall. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  4. Case, Anne & Paxson, Christina, 2001. "Mothers and others: who invests in children's health?," Journal of Health Economics, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 301-328, May. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  5. Polachek, Solomon William, 1981. "Occupational Self-Selection: A Human Capital Approach to Sex Differences in Occupational Structure," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 63(1), pages 60-69, February. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  6. Boskin, Michael J, 1974. "A Conditional Logit Model of Occupational Choice," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 82(2), pages 389-98, Part I, M. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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Cited by:
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  1. Sherman Folland, 2006. "Value of life and behavior toward health risks: an interpretation of social capital," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 15(2), pages 159-171. [Downloadable!]
  2. John Leeth & John Ruser, 2006. "Safety segregation: The importance of gender, race, and ethnicity on workplace risk," Journal of Economic Inequality, Springer, vol. 4(2), pages 123-152, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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This page was last updated on 2009-11-25.

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