In their incorporation into the working world, women are increasingly more present in management and professional posts, and they have in a large proportion accessed administrative, commercial and services sector posts. However, they continue to account for a minority in the manual occupations; jobs such as, for example, those performed in mining, industry, construction or facilities maintenance. As reflected in figure 1, in the European Union nearly two out of every three manual workers are men (64.6%).

Added to the lower presence of women in manual jobs is the fact that, when they access jobs of this type, they do so in typically female posts such as, for example, those related with the cleaning sector or kitchen assistants. Female-dominated occupations are those in which over 66.6% of workers are women. In contrast, male-dominated occupations are those in which over 66.6% of the workers are men (Jacobs, 1989). The rest, in other words those in which there are between 33.3% and 66.6% of men and women, are considered neutral in terms of gender.

This occupational segregation by gender is very relevant for the salary equality of men and women, since, within the manual occupations, those that are traditionally male-dominated have a slightly higher skill level, better training opportunities and are better paid than those occupied by women. Manual occupations can be classed as skilled and non-skilled. Skilled manual occupations require knowledge and experience to carry out skilled jobs. They include, for example, carpenters, framers, plumbers, welders, electricians or tailors. Non-skilled manual occupations, however, do not require prior knowledge and are based on simple and routine tasks. These include drivers, machine operators, assemblers, and other elementary occupations such as domestic workers, cleaning staff, kitchen assistants and weavers.

Therefore, understanding the dynamics of segregation by gender in both cases – both in manual occupations, on the one hand, and in male-dominated manual occupations, on the other, is crucial for understanding other gender and class imbalances in the labour market.

Some authors have suggested that segregation by gender in manual occupations have their origin in the education system (for example, Bergmann, 2011). If this were so, we would expect to find, in countries with more widespread vocational training, which is usually the entrance route into the manual professions, more women in these types of occupations. However, as shown by figure 2, there does not seem to be any relationship between the reach of vocational training in a country’s education system and the degree of segregation by gender in the male manual occupations.

It is true that in some countries with a high proportion of vocational training students such as, for example, Greece, there are more women in male-dominated manual occupations. However, the association between the two aspects has quite an erratic relationship across the set of countries. Therefore, there is no relationship between the offer of vocational training in a country’s education system and the presence of women in male-dominated manual occupations. These results are maintained when more sophisticated statistical models are used in which the analysis (25 countries between 2008 and 2016) includes variables such as the relative weight of vocational training and the size of blue-collar sector in each country, and other variables on an individual level. Italso takes into account simultaneously the weight of manual jobs over the total of the economy.

In short, everything points to the fact that the presence of women in male-dominated manual occupations does not increase in the countries where vocational training is more widespread. Rather to the contrary, vocational training may contribute to reproduce and reinforce in the educational system the segregation of the labour market, along the lines noted by Reisel et al. (2016), among others. Proof of this is that a large part of the vocational training offer is even more segregated by gender than that of university education as happens, for example, with specialities such as mechanical manufacturing, electricity or computer studies, on the one hand, and personal image, healthcare and dressmaking, on the other.

The factor that does crucially influence occupation and, ultimately, the degree of gender segregation, is the parents’ occupation. The influence is exercised in two ways: firstly, through the inheritance of the social class of the parents (which is equivalent in men and women) and, secondly, as various specialised studies have advanced, through the different transmission of expectations by gender (see, for example, England 2010).

With regard to the first channel, it is observed that the children of parents with manual jobs have higher probabilities of ending up in these types of occupations (figure 3). In contrast, parents having an occupation with a higher status (management, professional) when the person is 14 years old, reduces the probability of accessing a manual occupation. In other words, there is a lot of class reproduction among manual workers: if the parents are manual workers when their children are adolescents, it is much more probable that children will end up having an occupation of this type, both in the case of men and in that of women.

In second place, the occupation of their parents – and especially that of their mothers – is very important for predicting the occupation of daughters. This is shown in figure 4, which shows the effects of the occupation of the mother in sons and daughters. When we focus on male-dominated manual jobs, with greater prestige and better remuneration, we observe that the sons have a very high and very similar probability of access to these types of jobs, regardless of the mother’s employment situation. The situation for daughters is very different because, in general, they have a lower probability of accessing these occupations, but the probability of accessing male-dominated manual jobs increases considerably when the mother is a professional or manager. In this case, the probability of a woman who has a manual occupation being able to have a typically male-dominated job, generally with greater prestige and higher remuneration, is increased (figure 4).

In other words, although daughters whose mothers work in prestigious occupations are less likely to work in manual occupations than others (due to a class reproduction effect), once they do access them, it is more probable that they will break with gender stereotypes and occupy posts that traditionally were occupied by men and that usually offer better employment conditions.

Despite all the advances in the incorporation of women into the world of work, they remain concentrated in traditionally female occupations. This segregation by gender is even more evident in manual jobs. This research has shown that participation of the women in manual occupations does not grow in countries where vocational training is more widespread, but that it is individual factors related with the reproduction of class within the family sphere that determine this situation.

With regard to education, everything seems to indicate that in the majority of European countries vocational training has not been sufficient to integrate women into typically male jobs; in contrast, this has been achieved by tertiary education with disciplines such as medicine, law and architecture, in which the gender balance is greater. This is due, at least in part, to the reproduction of class among working families, who furthermore are more likely to educate in traditional gender roles. For this reason, while upper-class families increasingly encourage their daughters to break with gender stereotypes and to work as doctors, lawyers or architects, among the daughters of working-class families gender stereotypes are perpetuated to a larger extent, therefore they continue concentrated in traditionally female jobs, that are generally worse paid, such as hairdressing, cleaning and caregiving.

Segregation by gender in the labour market has its roots in the stereotypes that already appear in childhood such as, for example, the fact that boys want to be mechanics when they grow up and girls want to be nurses. Parents with a higher educational level and a better socioeconomic position usually have more progressive views on gender roles than those of the working class. As these attitudes are transmitted from one generation to the next, this explains why in families with a higher social status, sons and daughters have occupational aspirations less based on gender stereotypes (Polavieja and Platt, 2014). Therefore, if education and labour policies propose to reduce gender segregation in employment, and particularly in the manual occupations, then they must take into account this mechanism from an individual and structural point of view alike, especially during childhood and adolescence.

BERGMANN, B.R. (2011): «Sex segregation in the blue-collar occupations: women’s choices or unremedied discrimination? Comment on England», Gender & Society, 25(1).

ENGLAND, P. (2010): «The gender revolution: uneven and stalled», Gender & Society, 24(2).

JACOBS, J.A. (1989): Revolving doors. Sex segregation and women’s careers, Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

POLAVIEJA, J., and L. PLATT (2014): «Nurse or mechanic? The role of parental socialization and children’s personality in the formation of sex-typed occupational aspirations», Social Forces, 92(1).

REISEL, L., K. Hegna and C. Imdorf (2016): «Gender segregation in vocational education: introduction», en Gender segregation in vocational education, Bingley: Emerald Insight.

TORRE, M. (2019): «Women in blue: Structural and Individual Determinants of Sex Segregation in Blue-Collar Occupations», Gender & Society, Vol 33(3).