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.