Trends in Occupational Segregation Between Women and Men in New Zealand

Abstract

[from Introduction] The changing role of women in the economy is a central feature of societal change in developed countries over the past decades. For example, in the United States female labour-force participation rose from 43.3 % in 1970 to 56.2 % in 2020 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023). Similar increases are evident across many high-income countries (Ortiz-Ospina, Tzvetkova, and Roser, 2018), including New Zealand (NZ) where female labour-force participation increased from 54.8 % in 1987 to 66.7 % in 2025 (Stats NZ, 2025). In educational attainment, women now outperform men in most OECD countries (OECD, 2024). In NZ, 44.8 % of women aged 25 to 64 years have a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared with 34.2 % of men (OECD, 2024). Occupational segregation, however, remains persistent in developed countries (Lind and Colquhoun, 2021; Salardi, 2016; Blau, Brummund, and Liu, 2013) and has increased in parts of the developing world (Borrowman and Klasen, 2020). This matters for several reasons. At the individual level, it can limit women’s economic opportunities. At the macroeconomic level, occupational segregation could imply a misallocation of talent that impedes economic growth (Hsieh, Hurst, Jones, and Klenow, 2019).