Occupational segregation and psychological gender differences: How empathizing and systemizing help explain the distribution of men and women into (some) occupations

• We examine how empathizing and systemizing relate to gender work segregation.
• Half of the occupations segregated by gender were related to worker EQ or SQ.
• The gender differences were partially mediated by SQ and/or EQ for some of the occupations.

The proportion of men and women workers varies among occupation types. There are several factors that may contribute to occupational segregation by gender. Using a large U.S. sample (n = 2149), we examine the extent to which occupational segregation can be attributed to gender differences in empathizing and systematizing: Psychological dimensions which theorists argue represent meaningful differences between men and women. Of the eight occupational categories for which employee gender and occupation type were associated at the p < .01 level, four of these – Construction, Professional/Scientific/Technical fields, Management, and Education – were partially mediated by systemizing and/or empathizing scores, which typically accounted for 10–20% of the observed gender differences. For other areas, like Health, gender differences were not mediated by either measure.