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A new sociological study evaluated more than 127 billion words found in publications over a nearly 120-year period to shine a light on the various cultural reasons why society often devalues occupations typically held by women. The study "The Cultural Devaluation of Feminized Work: The Evolution of U.S. Occupational Prestige and Gender Typing in Linguistic Representations, 1900 to 2019" by Wenhao Jiang (Duke University) is in the American Sociological Review.

While some prior studies of gendered occupational stereotypes have focused on the economic explanations for the devaluation of female-associated occupations, this new study investigates the historical evolution of how public culture understands the femininity of various occupations and their associated perceived value.

In this study, Jiang found that the cultural framing of occupations influenced how occupations are perceived; occupations that became increasingly female-typed tend to lose their symbolic value of power and prestige, while their perceived moral standing remains intact.

To measure public culture pervasive in U.S. society, Jiang proposed a semantic approach, investigating how language encodes social stereotypes in gendered occupation titles and descriptions. The author looked at occupation titles and their proximity to gender- and prestige-signaling phrases in historical and contemporary publications and products of popular culture—such as newspapers, magazines, and movie scripts—between 1900 and 2019. The study evaluated more than 127 billion words of American English.

For example, if phrases such as "he aims to become a venerated engineer" or "she is just an attendant" were more frequently used than "she is studying to become just an engineer" or "he is a prestigious attendant," this illustrates how language underscores and reinforces a cultural affinity between engineer (or attendant) and men (or women) and status (or relative unimportance).

To validate such cultural measures of gender typing and perceived symbolic value of occupations, Jiang also used other sources, such as census-based measures of each occupation's gender composition and survey-based measures of occupation prestige, and found a close alignment between the two measures.

In tracing the temporal dynamics of how occupations become stereotyped as more or less female as their objective female shares change, as well as the extent to which occupations are associated with terms symbolizing value and prestige, Jiang found that "cultural feminization has largely occurred in lower- and middle-income occupations."

For example, despite feminizing rapidly in recent years, high-income professional and managerial occupations have largely resisted corresponding cultural shifts, potentially because the culturally most visible positions within these occupations—such as CEOs and board members—remain predominantly male.

However, when an occupation's semantic association with gender shifts toward being female, its symbolic value associated with potency and general prestige, but not moral standing or liveliness, tends to decline. Jiang noted that "the cultural devaluation is an important mechanism linking occupational gender typing to actual hourly wages," explaining between 22.4% to 25.9% of the observed negative link.

Jiang concludes that "Workplace-level devaluation processes may not only mirror, but also reinforce and amplify, the symbolic penalties observed at the occupational level. A fuller account of economic inequality would benefit from research that traces how these cultural processes unfold relationally within organizations—from occupational classification to workplace practice."