* Special thanks also to The Gender Wage Gap: Taking Into Consideration Occupational Characteristics and Gender Segregation

This study investigates the effect of working in gender-dominated occupations on wages. It controls for a set of key skill requirements and working conditions that define an occupation in order to isolate the impact of working in an environment with a higher percentage of women. The main goal is to take advantage of the detailed information about occupational characteristics provided by the O*NET database by combining it with data from the Census 5% sample of the US population in 2000 to analyze earnings and the wage differential between men and women. This approach builds on previous studies that have drawn occupational information from the Dictionary of Occupational Titles which is meant to be replaced by the O*NET. Using this new source of rich occupational data, this paper aims to provide better estimates of both the cost of working in highly feminized occupations and the contribution of occupational segregation to the measured gender wage gap