Gender jobs shift puts women in the driver’s seat

The imbalance of women in male-dominated roles is being corrected in a process called the great gender-job shift.

Women are now better represented in higher-paid, more prestigious job roles, a boon for the real estate industry

The gender-job shift is one of the most important social issues of our time. It goes to the heart of our determination to provide equal access to jobs. The argument being that over time women have been largely excluded from male-dominated jobs and that imbalance is being corrected in a process called the great gender-job shift.

This is an important issue for the property industry because, if a gender-job shift is under way, then women will have a rising capacity to independently buy residential property. This could create a market nuanced to female needs — for example, greater security features.

Let’s see what the data say about Australia’s gender-job shift.

The best data source to track this issue is the quarterly labour force surveys completed by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, which publishes estimates of the number of workers employed in 406 job or occupation categories between 1986 and 2019.

The most recent data relates to December 2019, when there were 12.996 million (full-time and part-time) workers in the workforce.

We have classified each of the 406 occupations into one of five skill levels (as defined elsewhere by the ABS) in order to complete this analysis. Skill Level 1 requires university training and includes, for example, accountants with 197,000 jobs at December 2019. Skill Level 5 covers unskilled work and includes, for example, general sales assistants with 482,000 jobs at ­December 2019.

There are 123 occupations in Skill Level I comprising 4.1 million jobs, and there are 54 occupations in Skill Level 5 comprising 2.1 million jobs. The remaining 6.8 million jobs are spread across middle Australia’s 229 remaining occupations (eg police officer, butcher, barista) that fall within the expertise of Skill Levels 2, 3 and 4. In this exercise, I am looking solely at the gender-job shift in the most-skilled and least-skilled ends of the job spectrum. Generally the higher the skill level, the higher the remuneration, but this is not always the case.

In Skill Level 1 jobs, women outnumber men in jobs delivering education, social welfare and healthcare. In 2019, women claimed 85 per cent of jobs as primary school teachers, 89 per cent of jobs as social workers, and 90 per cent as registered nurses. At the same time men claimed 77 per cent of jobs as ICT managers, 81 per cent of jobs as chief executive, and 89 per cent of jobs as geologists. The real value of this dataset is that it tracks the shift in the share of jobs by gender over time.

Between 1986 and 2019, women have lifted their share of Skill Level 1 jobs from 16 per cent to 74 per cent in the case of optometrists, from 4 per cent to 50 per cent in the case of legislators (politicians), from 12 per cent to 59 per cent across the judiciary, and from 21 per cent to 67 per cent in the case of psychiatrists.

At an aggregate level, women have lifted their share of Skill Level 1 jobs from 36 per cent in 1986 to 50 per cent in 2019. And while this gender-job shift has opened up high-paying, high-prestige work opportunities for women over the course of a generation, there are some areas where progress has been slow. In 1986, women accounted for 21 per cent of all surgeons whereas by 2019 this proportion had fallen to 13 per cent. The number of female surgeons increased from 407 to 736 over this period, but the number of male surgeons must have increased faster.

At the other end of the jobs spectrum, at Skill Level 5, in 2019 women dominated occupations as cafe workers (77 per cent), domestic cleaners (78 per cent), and pharmacy assistants (90 per cent).

At the same time, unskilled men dominated jobs like concreter (99 per cent), car detailer (96 per cent) and building and plumbing labourer (96 per cent).

Occupations where unskilled women have taken a greater share of the available work between 1986 and 2019 include food trades assistants (up from 8 per cent to 69 per cent), other hospitality workers (up from 15 per cent to 75 per cent), and models and sales demonstrators (up from 32 per cent to 91 per cent).

In aggregate terms, women accounted for 50 per cent of Skill Level 5 jobs in 1986 and for 49 per cent in 2019. In other words, while there has been significant change in the unskilled segment of the workforce for men and women, this has not resulted in any fundamental shift in the share of this work. Men and women are equally as likely to do unskilled work in 2019 as was the case in 1986.

The loss of factory work may have diminished over these years but jobs in hospitality have expanded. However, this gender-shift ­dataset doesn’t take into account factors such as pay rates for different jobs or the general diminution in the security of unskilled work, which may favour, for example, concreting men as opposed to waitressing women.

A full list of the 406 occupations comprising the workforce showing the gender share of jobs in 1986 and 2019 is accessible via the online version of this column. We have added the ABS’s skill level rating to this dataset to assist with interpretation.

There can be little doubt that baby-boomer, Generation X and millennial women, who progressively entered the workforce over the past 34 years (since 1986), have taken a greater share of some of the most prestigious and highly remunerated jobs. Women comprised barely a third of the general practitioner workforce in 1986 (that is, 7900 doctors), whereas today this share is 53 per cent and the number of female doctors has increased fivefold to 37,000.

Women have also taken market share from men working as solicitors: from a female workforce of 2400 or 15 per cent in 1986 to 38,000 (52 per cent) in 2019.

Women are now more likely than men to be doctors and lawyers and barristers (up from 15 per cent in 1986 to 56 per cent in 2019). Women have also made inroads into the occupation of specialist physician: up from 21 per cent to 45 per cent over these years. In an aggregate sense, women have lifted their share from 40 per cent of jobs to 47 per cent between 1986 and 2019. Much of these gains have been made not so much at the lower end of the jobs (or skill level) pyramid but at the upper end.

But this is where inequities were greatest in the mid-80s and it reflects broader social shifts. The women’s movement empowered women to make different life ­choices that included prioritising tertiary education over marriage and children in their 20s. A generation later and the social dividend of contraception, the women’s movement, the upskilling of the workforce, of access to a university education, enables women to compete with men for the most prestigious and high-paying jobs.

And from a property perspective this is good news. More women working in higher-paying jobs translates into greater demand for urban lifestyle property that, let’s face it, showcases success and facilitates a busy lifestyle. I can’t see women, or anyone for that matter, giving up on this fundamental Australian dream.

Bernard Salt is managing director of The Demographics Group. Research by Hari Hara Priya Kannan

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