Intergenerational Transmission of Preferences and Occupational Segregation of Women in the Labour Market

This paper provides an explanation of the evolution and persistence of the occupational segregation of women to jobs involving less training than those of men within the framework of an overlapping generations model which includes intergenerational transmission of preferences. Two types of preferences are considered: ¿job-priority¿ and ¿family-priority¿ preferences. Firms, facing a particular female job applicant, decide about on-the-job training on the basis of the expected labour force withdrawal rate of women on average, that is, statistical discrimination arises. The results show that the gap in job training between men and women diminishes over time but that it persists. At the unique stable steady state there exists a mixture of both types of preferences. I show that a steady state with homogeneous preferences is dynamically unstable