Work, Occupations, and Professions

While we often use these words interchangeably, they do have distinct meanings.

• Work refers to activities producing goods and services for one’s own use or in exchange for pay and support.
• Occupation is generally defined as one’s trade, profession, or business—literally that which occupies your time. In this case, however, it refers to collections of jobs that involve similar activities in different establishments.
• Profession is an occupation or vocation that requires advanced education and training and involves intellectual skills such as teaching, medicine, law, engineering, and theology.
• Job is a specific piece of work, typically with a specific employer.

So, work is a kind of generic term for employment or self-employment, including forms that involve barter or providing services for support. An occupation would be a particular kind of work, and a profession is an occupation that requires advanced education.

Putting It All Together: Gender, Occupations, and Professions

When we look at gender and sex in relation to occupations and professions, we discover that gender rules! Here’s how. First, most occupations are sex segregated. That is, men and women are concentrated in different occupations. This is called occupational segregation. While occupational segregation by sex has diminished since the 1960s, it remains the norm.

Occupational segregation takes place across occupations and within them. Thus we can distinguish between two forms of occupational segregation by sex. Horizontal segregation refers to the distribution of men and women across occupations, where women and men are clustered in different, specific fields. Women are found over-whelmingly in a few fields: clerical occupations, nursing, child care, and other service work. Almost half of all women work in occupations that are more than 75 percent female. Males are found in most other occupations: construction, extraction industries, manufacturing, engineering, transportation, and clergy to name a few. Vertical segregation refers to the distribution of men and women in the same occupation, but with one sex more likely to be at a higher grade or level. For example, men are more likely to be production supervisors while women are production workers.

Also, female-dominated occupations are consistent with typical gender stereotypes about women. So women predominate in health and other services industries— reflecting the nurturing stereotype about women. Indeed, until 50 years ago, in the United States, nursing and teaching were virtually the only two professions for women. This has changed somewhat: women now comprise nearly half of both law and medical school students. However, gender-stereotyped occupations are not necessarily consistent with biological differences between the sexes. For example, the chief executive officer of a multinational corporation does not need great physical strength for his job (a male stereotype).

Finally, female-dominated occupations tend to have relatively low pay and status. Even within occupations dominated by women, men have higher earnings (as the schematic on vertical segregation illustrates).

Overall therefore, women are concentrated in a limited number of occupations and their earnings are lower than those of men. Within any particular occupation or workplace, women and men are likely to have different jobs, rankings, access to career ladders, and other benefits. Much of the difference in earnings is commonly attributed to factors such as: women spend fewer years in the paid workforce; they are more likely to work part-time and thus do not enjoy the benefits of much career ladders available to men; they do different work; and so on. However, statistics indicate that women who work full-time and all year still take home three-quarters or less pay than their male counterparts. The situation is worse for women of color. Latina or black woman face more barriers to employment than white woman even when both have equal qualifications. High school drop-out rates are higher among Latina females than among black or white females. Therefore we need to remember that within the category of gender are found many subcategories; all males and all females do not have the same experiences related to occupations and professions because of these other factors.