factor affecting job mobility across the career (Podolny & Baron,
1997).
The way in which labor market structures differentially shape
the career experiences of men and women has been of particular
interest to sociologists of work over the past several decades. Occu-
pational segregation—the tendency for men and women to work in
different occupations—is believed to be an important determinant
of the wage gap between men and women. Because of an oversup-
ply of women in a small number of female-dominated occupations,
occupational segregation depresses all women’s wages, even women
working in male-dominated occupations (Cotter et al., 1997). Al-
though many women move back and forth between male- and
female-dominated jobs (Rosenfeld & Spenner, 1992), women who
work in “heavily female” occupations—over 90 percent of incum-
bents are females—experience a cumulative disadvantage, or what
Chan (1999) calls a ghetto effect. Women in such occupations are
essentially trapped, with very few moving into other, less female-
dominated and higher-paying occupations.
Marini and Fan (1997) examined men’s and women’s earnings
at career entry—a time in which the gender gap in wages ought to
be smallest. At this point in their careers, women earned 84 cents
for every dollar men earned. About 30 percent of this difference was
attributed to gender differences in relevant worker characteristics
like skills, credentials, and workers’ aspirations. The adult family
roles of men and women were of little importance in explaining this
early gender gap in wages. Marini and Fan attribute another 42 per-
cent of the earnings gap to the combined influence of the allocation
of men and women to different jobs by employers and of social net-
works that provide job-relevant information and influence to men
and women. Such employer and network action leads men and
women into different occupations and industries at career entry.
They conclude:
The association between the sex composition of a job and its
wage rate within the organizational structure of the labor mar-50 CAREER CHOICE AND DEVELOPMENT