Accident risk, gender, family status and occupational choice in the UK

Many studies show that women are more risk averse than men. In this paper, following DeLeire and Levy [Deleire T. and Levy H. (2004) ‘Worker Sorting and the Risk of Death on the Job’, Journal of Labor Economics, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 210–217.] for the US, we use family structure as a proxy for the degree of risk aversion to test the proposition that those with strong aversion to risk will make occupational choices biased towards safer jobs. In line with DeLeire and Levy we find that women are more risk averse than men and those that are single with children are more risk averse than those without. The effect on the degree of gender segregation is somewhat smaller than for the US.