occupational inequality essay

Report | Wages, Incomes, and Wealth

“Women’s work” and the gender pay gap : How discrimination, societal norms, and other forces affect women’s occupational choices—and their pay

Report • By Jessica Schieder and Elise Gould • July 20, 2016

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What this report finds: Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men—despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment. Too often it is assumed that this pay gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors—particularly occupational differences between women and men—are themselves often affected by gender bias. For example, by the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work–family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.

Why it matters, and how to fix it: The gender wage gap is real—and hurts women across the board by suppressing their earnings and making it harder to balance work and family. Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should not include shifting the blame to women for not earning more. Rather, these attempts should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.

Introduction and key findings

Women are paid 79 cents for every dollar paid to men (Hegewisch and DuMonthier 2016). This is despite the fact that over the last several decades millions more women have joined the workforce and made huge gains in their educational attainment.

Critics of this widely cited statistic claim it is not solid evidence of economic discrimination against women because it is unadjusted for characteristics other than gender that can affect earnings, such as years of education, work experience, and location. Many of these skeptics contend that the gender wage gap is driven not by discrimination, but instead by voluntary choices made by men and women—particularly the choice of occupation in which they work. And occupational differences certainly do matter—occupation and industry account for about half of the overall gender wage gap (Blau and Kahn 2016).

To isolate the impact of overt gender discrimination—such as a woman being paid less than her male coworker for doing the exact same job—it is typical to adjust for such characteristics. But these adjusted statistics can radically understate the potential for gender discrimination to suppress women’s earnings. This is because gender discrimination does not occur only in employers’ pay-setting practices. It can happen at every stage leading to women’s labor market outcomes.

Take one key example: occupation of employment. While controlling for occupation does indeed reduce the measured gender wage gap, the sorting of genders into different occupations can itself be driven (at least in part) by discrimination. By the time a woman earns her first dollar, her occupational choice is the culmination of years of education, guidance by mentors, expectations set by those who raised her, hiring practices of firms, and widespread norms and expectations about work–family balance held by employers, co-workers, and society. In other words, even though women disproportionately enter lower-paid, female-dominated occupations, this decision is shaped by discrimination, societal norms, and other forces beyond women’s control.

This paper explains why gender occupational sorting is itself part of the discrimination women face, examines how this sorting is shaped by societal and economic forces, and explains that gender pay gaps are present even  within  occupations.

Key points include:

• Gender pay gaps within occupations persist, even after accounting for years of experience, hours worked, and education.
• Decisions women make about their occupation and career do not happen in a vacuum—they are also shaped by society.
• The long hours required by the highest-paid occupations can make it difficult for women to succeed, since women tend to shoulder the majority of family caretaking duties.
• Many professions dominated by women are low paid, and professions that have become female-dominated have become lower paid.

This report examines wages on an hourly basis. Technically, this is an adjusted gender wage gap measure. As opposed to weekly or annual earnings, hourly earnings ignore the fact that men work more hours on average throughout a week or year. Thus, the hourly gender wage gap is a bit smaller than the 79 percent figure cited earlier. This minor adjustment allows for a comparison of women’s and men’s wages without assuming that women, who still shoulder a disproportionate amount of responsibilities at home, would be able or willing to work as many hours as their male counterparts. Examining the hourly gender wage gap allows for a more thorough conversation about how many factors create the wage gap women experience when they cash their paychecks.

Within-occupation gender wage gaps are large—and persist after controlling for education and other factors

Those keen on downplaying the gender wage gap often claim women voluntarily choose lower pay by disproportionately going into stereotypically female professions or by seeking out lower-paid positions. But even when men and women work in the same occupation—whether as hairdressers, cosmetologists, nurses, teachers, computer engineers, mechanical engineers, or construction workers—men make more, on average, than women (CPS microdata 2011–2015).

As a thought experiment, imagine if women’s occupational distribution mirrored men’s. For example, if 2 percent of men are carpenters, suppose 2 percent of women become carpenters. What would this do to the wage gap? After controlling for differences in education and preferences for full-time work, Goldin (2014) finds that 32 percent of the gender pay gap would be closed.

However, leaving women in their current occupations and just closing the gaps between women and their male counterparts within occupations (e.g., if male and female civil engineers made the same per hour) would close 68 percent of the gap. This means examining why waiters and waitresses, for example, with the same education and work experience do not make the same amount per hour. To quote Goldin:

Another way to measure the effect of occupation is to ask what would happen to the aggregate gender gap if one equalized earnings by gender within each occupation or, instead, evened their proportions for each occupation. The answer is that equalizing earnings within each occupation matters far more than equalizing the proportions by each occupation. (Goldin 2014)

This phenomenon is not limited to low-skilled occupations, and women cannot educate themselves out of the gender wage gap (at least in terms of broad formal credentials). Indeed, women’s educational attainment outpaces men’s; 37.0 percent of women have a college or advanced degree, as compared with 32.5 percent of men (CPS ORG 2015). Furthermore, women earn less per hour at every education level, on average. As shown in Figure A , men with a college degree make more per hour than women with an advanced degree. Likewise, men with a high school degree make more per hour than women who attended college but did not graduate. Even straight out of college, women make $4 less per hour than men—a gap that has grown since 2000 (Kroeger, Cooke, and Gould 2016).

Women earn less than men at every education level : Average hourly wages, by gender and education, 2015

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The data underlying the figure.

Source :  EPI analysis of Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata

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Steering women to certain educational and professional career paths—as well as outright discrimination—can lead to different occupational outcomes

The gender pay gap is driven at least in part by the cumulative impact of many instances over the course of women’s lives when they are treated differently than their male peers. Girls can be steered toward gender-normative careers from a very early age. At a time when parental influence is key, parents are often more likely to expect their sons, rather than their daughters, to work in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) fields, even when their daughters perform at the same level in mathematics (OECD 2015).

Expectations can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. A 2005 study found third-grade girls rated their math competency scores much lower than boys’, even when these girls’ performance did not lag behind that of their male counterparts (Herbert and Stipek 2005). Similarly, in states where people were more likely to say that “women [are] better suited for home” and “math is for boys,” girls were more likely to have lower math scores and higher reading scores (Pope and Sydnor 2010). While this only establishes a correlation, there is no reason to believe gender aptitude in reading and math would otherwise be related to geography. Parental expectations can impact performance by influencing their children’s self-confidence because self-confidence is associated with higher test scores (OECD 2015).

By the time young women graduate from high school and enter college, they already evaluate their career opportunities differently than young men do. Figure B shows college freshmen’s intended majors by gender. While women have increasingly gone into medical school and continue to dominate the nursing field, women are significantly less likely to arrive at college interested in engineering, computer science, or physics, as compared with their male counterparts.

Women arrive at college less interested in STEM fields as compared with their male counterparts : Intent of first-year college students to major in select STEM fields, by gender, 2014

Source:  EPI adaptation of Corbett and Hill (2015) analysis of Eagan et al. (2014)

These decisions to allow doors to lucrative job opportunities to close do not take place in a vacuum. Many factors might make it difficult for a young woman to see herself working in computer science or a similarly remunerative field. A particularly depressing example is the well-publicized evidence of sexism in the tech industry (Hewlett et al. 2008). Unfortunately, tech isn’t the only STEM field with this problem.

Young women may be discouraged from certain career paths because of industry culture. Even for women who go against the grain and pursue STEM careers, if employers in the industry foster an environment hostile to women’s participation, the share of women in these occupations will be limited. One 2008 study found that “52 percent of highly qualified females working for SET [science, technology, and engineering] companies quit their jobs, driven out by hostile work environments and extreme job pressures” (Hewlett et al. 2008). Extreme job pressures are defined as working more than 100 hours per week, needing to be available 24/7, working with or managing colleagues in multiple time zones, and feeling pressure to put in extensive face time (Hewlett et al. 2008). As compared with men, more than twice as many women engage in housework on a daily basis, and women spend twice as much time caring for other household members (BLS 2015). Because of these cultural norms, women are less likely to be able to handle these extreme work pressures. In addition, 63 percent of women in SET workplaces experience sexual harassment (Hewlett et al. 2008). To make matters worse, 51 percent abandon their SET training when they quit their job. All of these factors play a role in steering women away from highly paid occupations, particularly in STEM fields.

The long hours required for some of the highest-paid occupations are incompatible with historically gendered family responsibilities

Those seeking to downplay the gender wage gap often suggest that women who work hard enough and reach the apex of their field will see the full fruits of their labor. In reality, however, the gender wage gap is wider for those with higher earnings. Women in the top 95th percentile of the wage distribution experience a much larger gender pay gap than lower-paid women.

Again, this large gender pay gap between the highest earners is partially driven by gender bias. Harvard economist Claudia Goldin (2014) posits that high-wage firms have adopted pay-setting practices that disproportionately reward individuals who work very long and very particular hours. This means that even if men and women are equally productive per hour, individuals—disproportionately men—who are more likely to work excessive hours and be available at particular off-hours are paid more highly (Hersch and Stratton 2002; Goldin 2014; Landers, Rebitzer, and Taylor 1996).

It is clear why this disadvantages women. Social norms and expectations exert pressure on women to bear a disproportionate share of domestic work—particularly caring for children and elderly parents. This can make it particularly difficult for them (relative to their male peers) to be available at the drop of a hat on a Sunday evening after working a 60-hour week. To the extent that availability to work long and particular hours makes the difference between getting a promotion or seeing one’s career stagnate, women are disadvantaged.

And this disadvantage is reinforced in a vicious circle. Imagine a household where both members of a male–female couple have similarly demanding jobs. One partner’s career is likely to be prioritized if a grandparent is hospitalized or a child’s babysitter is sick. If the past history of employer pay-setting practices that disadvantage women has led to an already-existing gender wage gap for this couple, it can be seen as “rational” for this couple to prioritize the male’s career. This perpetuates the expectation that it always makes sense for women to shoulder the majority of domestic work, and further exacerbates the gender wage gap.

Female-dominated professions pay less, but it’s a chicken-and-egg phenomenon

Many women do go into low-paying female-dominated industries. Home health aides, for example, are much more likely to be women. But research suggests that women are making a logical choice, given existing constraints . This is because they will likely not see a significant pay boost if they try to buck convention and enter male-dominated occupations. Exceptions certainly exist, particularly in the civil service or in unionized workplaces (Anderson, Hegewisch, and Hayes 2015). However, if women in female-dominated occupations were to go into male-dominated occupations, they would often have similar or lower expected wages as compared with their female counterparts in female-dominated occupations (Pitts 2002). Thus, many women going into female-dominated occupations are actually situating themselves to earn higher wages. These choices thereby maximize their wages (Pitts 2002). This holds true for all categories of women except for the most educated, who are more likely to earn more in a male profession than a female profession. There is also evidence that if it becomes more lucrative for women to move into male-dominated professions, women will do exactly this (Pitts 2002). In short, occupational choice is heavily influenced by existing constraints based on gender and pay-setting across occupations.

To make matters worse, when women increasingly enter a field, the average pay in that field tends to decline, relative to other fields. Levanon, England, and Allison (2009) found that when more women entered an industry, the relative pay of that industry 10 years later was lower. Specifically, they found evidence of devaluation—meaning the proportion of women in an occupation impacts the pay for that industry because work done by women is devalued.

Computer programming is an example of a field that has shifted from being a very mixed profession, often associated with secretarial work in the past, to being a lucrative, male-dominated profession (Miller 2016; Oldenziel 1999). While computer programming has evolved into a more technically demanding occupation in recent decades, there is no skills-based reason why the field needed to become such a male-dominated profession. When men flooded the field, pay went up. In contrast, when women became park rangers, pay in that field went down (Miller 2016).

Further compounding this problem is that many professions where pay is set too low by market forces, but which clearly provide enormous social benefits when done well, are female-dominated. Key examples range from home health workers who care for seniors, to teachers and child care workers who educate today’s children. If closing gender pay differences can help boost pay and professionalism in these key sectors, it would be a huge win for the economy and society.

The gender wage gap is real—and hurts women across the board. Too often it is assumed that this gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors—particularly occupational differences between women and men—are themselves affected by gender bias. Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should not include shifting the blame to women for not earning more. Rather, these attempts should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.

— This paper was made possible by a grant from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation. The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the authors.

— The authors wish to thank Josh Bivens, Barbara Gault, and Heidi Hartman for their helpful comments.

About the authors

Jessica Schieder joined EPI in 2015. As a research assistant, she supports the research of EPI’s economists on topics such as the labor market, wage trends, executive compensation, and inequality. Prior to joining EPI, Jessica worked at the Center for Effective Government (formerly OMB Watch) as a revenue and spending policies analyst, where she examined how budget and tax policy decisions impact working families. She holds a bachelor’s degree in international political economy from Georgetown University.

Elise Gould , senior economist, joined EPI in 2003. Her research areas include wages, poverty, economic mobility, and health care. She is a co-author of The State of Working America, 12th Edition . In the past, she has authored a chapter on health in The State of Working America 2008/09; co-authored a book on health insurance coverage in retirement; published in venues such as The Chronicle of Higher Education ,  Challenge Magazine , and Tax Notes; and written for academic journals including Health Economics , Health Affairs, Journal of Aging and Social Policy, Risk Management & Insurance Review, Environmental Health Perspectives , and International Journal of Health Services . She holds a master’s in public affairs from the University of Texas at Austin and a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Anderson, Julie, Ariane Hegewisch, and Jeff Hayes 2015. The Union Advantage for Women . Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Blau, Francine D., and Lawrence M. Kahn 2016. The Gender Wage Gap: Extent, Trends, and Explanations . National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 21913.

Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). 2015. American Time Use Survey public data series. U.S. Census Bureau.

Corbett, Christianne, and Catherine Hill. 2015. Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing . American Association of University Women (AAUW).

Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata (CPS ORG). 2011–2015. Survey conducted by the Bureau of the Census for the Bureau of Labor Statistics [ machine-readable microdata file ]. U.S. Census Bureau.

Goldin, Claudia. 2014. “ A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter .” American Economic Review, vol. 104, no. 4, 1091–1119.

Hegewisch, Ariane, and Asha DuMonthier. 2016. The Gender Wage Gap: 2015; Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity . Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Herbert, Jennifer, and Deborah Stipek. 2005. “The Emergence of Gender Difference in Children’s Perceptions of Their Academic Competence.” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology , vol. 26, no. 3, 276–295.

Hersch, Joni, and Leslie S. Stratton. 2002. “ Housework and Wages .” The Journal of Human Resources , vol. 37, no. 1, 217–229.

Hewlett, Sylvia Ann, Carolyn Buck Luce, Lisa J. Servon, Laura Sherbin, Peggy Shiller, Eytan Sosnovich, and Karen Sumberg. 2008. The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology . Harvard Business Review.

Kroeger, Teresa, Tanyell Cooke, and Elise Gould. 2016.  The Class of 2016: The Labor Market Is Still Far from Ideal for Young Graduates . Economic Policy Institute.

Landers, Renee M., James B. Rebitzer, and Lowell J. Taylor. 1996. “ Rat Race Redux: Adverse Selection in the Determination of Work Hours in Law Firms .” American Economic Review , vol. 86, no. 3, 329–348.

Levanon, Asaf, Paula England, and Paul Allison. 2009. “Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950-2000 U.S. Census Data.” Social Forces, vol. 88, no. 2, 865–892.

Miller, Claire Cain. 2016. “As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops.” New York Times , March 18.

Oldenziel, Ruth. 1999. Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America, 1870-1945 . Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 2015. The ABC of Gender Equality in Education: Aptitude, Behavior, Confidence .

Pitts, Melissa M. 2002. Why Choose Women’s Work If It Pays Less? A Structural Model of Occupational Choice. Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, Working Paper 2002-30.

Pope, Devin G., and Justin R. Sydnor. 2010. “ Geographic Variation in the Gender Differences in Test Scores .” Journal of Economic Perspectives , vol. 24, no. 2, 95–108.

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Article Contents

Inequality, professions, and key challenges, can professions tackle the class ceiling, is the professional focus on culture a great mistake, global professional service firms and global inequality, professions and inequality, professions and inequality—towards an agenda for research and change.

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Professions and inequality: Challenges, controversies, and opportunities

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Louise Ashley, Mehdi Boussebaa, Sam Friedman, Brooke Harrington, Stefan Heusinkveld, Stefanie Gustafsson, Daniel Muzio, Professions and inequality: Challenges, controversies, and opportunities, Journal of Professions and Organization , Volume 10, Issue 1, February 2023, Pages 80–98, https://doi.org/10.1093/jpo/joac014

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On the basis of the EGOS 2021 sub-plenary on ‘Professions and Inequality: Challenges, Controversies, and Opportunities’, the presenters and panellists wrote four short essays on the relationship between inequality as a grand challenge and professional occupations and organizations, their structures, practices, and strategies. Individually, these essays take an inquisitorial stance on extant understandings of (1) how professions may exacerbate existing inequalities and (2) how professions can be part of the solution and help tackle inequality as a grand challenge. Taken together, the discussion forum aims at advancing scholarly debates on inequality by showing how professions’ scholarship may critically interrogate extant understandings of inequality as a broad, multifaceted concept, whilst providing fruitful directions for research on inequality, their potential solutions, and the role and responsibilities of organization and management scholars.

Stefan Heusinkveld, Stefanie Gustafsson and Daniel Muzio

Inequality and social justice are long-standing concerns in academic research and public policy (e.g., Amis, Mair and Munir, 2020 ; Benschop, 2021 ; Zanoni et al., 2010 ). Research has persistently shown that unequally distributed access to resources and opportunities affects individual and collective well-being may diminish growth and productivity and undermine trust in key societal institutions ( Amis et al., 2018 ). This is particularly so in the contemporary political context where years of austerity have amplified social divisions and fuelled attacks on democratic and capitalist institutions. Inequality is one of the grand challenges of our times, and despite the progress made in both research and practice, it is considered the responsibility of scholars to not only address the many unanswered questions that remain but also to tackle inequality in society itself ( Amis et al., 2021 ; Benschop, 2021 ).

In this article, we argue that professional occupations and organizations , their structures, practices, and strategies are central to this agenda, both as potential barriers and also as solutions to inequality. We posit that research on professions is a critical resource for theorizing on inequality. Professions are based—by definition—on exclusionary structures and dynamics, seeking to restrict access to opportunities to a limited circle of eligible candidates in order to maintain their professional status ( Abbott, 1988 ). Substantial academic research in this field has shown that these closure regimes are gendered and racialized, disadvantaging women, ethnic minorities and individuals from less privileged backgrounds (e.g., Kay and Hagan, 1998 ; Kornberger, Carter and Ross-Smith, 2010 ; Tomlinson et al., 2013 , 2018 ; Carter, Spence and Muzio, 2015 ). Research on professions has also revealed that the most powerful professional services firms, deriving from a handful of largely Anglo-Saxon economies, are instrumental in maintaining and extending a capitalist and neo-liberal world order (e.g., Reed, 2018 ), while also contributing to the reproduction of neo-colonial practices and relationships (e.g., Boussebaa, 2015b ; Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, 2019 ). At its most extreme, studies show that professions have directly supported inequality by helping corporations and wealthy individuals to minimize, if not entirely elude their tax liabilities.

Yet, research has also evidenced how professional occupations and professional organizations can help to address inequality. Access to professional jobs and careers is an established route to upward social mobility. Women in many developed economies represent the majority of new entrants in professions, whilst black and minority ethnic individuals are often over-represented compared with their share of the population. Similarly, professions have an active role in the fight against inequality, by participating in the development and implementation of new products (micro-financing), organizations (social enterprises), regulations (new profit allocation rules for MNCs), and policies (international debt relief).

However, despite its value to advance scholarly debates on inequality, research on professions has not been systematically drawn upon as a fruitful conceptual resource and empirical context beyond occasional references and examples (e.g., Amis, Mair and Munir, 2020 ). This is remarkable not only given the field’s long-standing research tradition on inequality, but also given the importance of professions in maintaining societal inequality as well as their potential to offer impactful solutions. Indeed, professionals not only represent a substantial and growing portion of a country’s workforce ( Empson et al., 2015 ; Gorman, 2015 ) but are widely considered as key agents in the maintenance and change of institutions in contemporary society ( Scott, 2008 ; Suddaby and Viale, 2011 ; Muzio et al., 2013 ). Both characteristics also suggest a close proximity to the work and responsibilities of scholars as both teachers and researchers and privileged citizens. In other words, professions as a field of research, practice, and teaching are to be considered unique in their potential to further theorize on inequality more broadly and in promoting change.

To address these challenges, we invited the panellists of the EGOS 2021 sub-plenary on ‘Professions and Inequality’ to write a short essay on the relationship between inequality and professional occupations and organizations, drawing on insights from their research. In contrast to recent overviews of research on inequality and organizations, our contributors take a polemic and inquisitorial stance drawing on different levels of analysis and theoretical perspectives, thereby discovering differences and commonalities in scholarly views on how distinct professions relate to various aspects of inequality and to their potential solution. Firstly, in critically interrogating extant explanations of class inequalities in relation to professions, Sam Friedman shows how a primary focus on social mobility may obscure professions’ role in wider social patterns of inequality. He stresses the significance of enhancing transparency on socio-economic inequality in professions and firms, whilst also stimulating debates on how ‘talent’ is defined and rewarded. Secondly, Louise Ashley provides a comprehensive discussion of the possibilities and limitations of current scholarship and policies on inequality building on the work of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. She suggests alternative theoretical perspectives to rethink radical change in the current system of financial capitalism. In his essay, Mehdi Boussebaa also argues for radical change in limiting the (re)production of global inequalities by professional service firms (PSFs). He particularly emphasizes the role of professionals in the Global South to engage in cultural and economic resistance. Finally, Brooke Harrington ’s analysis shows how professions’ betrayal of their social contract in advancing the common good forms a critical basis for profound inequalities in contemporary society. In response, she advocates normative grassroots changes by advancing the fiduciary model that guides professionals’ understanding of their raison d’être. Together, as we will argue in the concluding part of this article, these contributions show the richness and value of research on professions in addressing unanswered questions and theorizing on inequality in management and organization studies while considering the role and responsibilities of organizational scholars in relation to the topic of inequality in their work.

Sam Friedman

In this essay, I reflect on the relationship between professions and class inequality, and specifically inequities in the professional workplace that flow from people’s social class origins. I first argue that the conventional sociological approach to social mobility is limited in two key ways; first, it fails to interrogate how rates of mobility vary across professions and, second, it tends to conceptualize social mobility as only an issue of occupational access rather than also pivotally career progression . I then show how recent studies from across sociology, social psychology and management have begun to remedy these issues, showing both how some professions are much more open than others to those from disadvantaged backgrounds and that those from working-class backgrounds often face significant class-origin pay gaps and ceilings within the professions. I then explore the potential mechanisms driving these class inequalities in career progression, both the ‘supply-side’ resources and dispositions that those privileged backgrounds tend to bring into the workplace and the ‘demand-side’ processes of cultural matching and intra-occupational sorting that means they are often more highly rewarded in their careers. I then explain that despite the growing evidence of class inequality in the workplace, professions themselves have been slow to take action. Only in the UK is a class starting to appear on the organizational agendas of professional employers, with a range of sectors starting to routinely collect data on the class origins of their staff and, in the case of firms of like KPMG, PWC, and the BBC, publicly commit to increasing the representation of senior managers from working-class backgrounds. While I argue that such moves should be welcomed, I conclude by cautioning that organizational social mobility agendas are restricted by a narrow focus on equality of opportunity and this can act to obscure how professions are implicated in wider societal patterns of class inequality. A more productive approach, I therefore suggest, would be for the ‘class agenda’ in the professions to focus not just on mobility but more broadly on class or socio-economic inequality—using the blueprint of the ‘Socioeconomic Duty’ set out in the UK Equality Act 2010.

The long shadow of class origin

Traditionally, the main point of entry into the subject of class in the professional workplace has been the study of social mobility—where ‘the professions’ are normally grouped together with managerial occupations to constitute a large, aggregate, socio-economic class ( Goldthorpe, Llewellyn and Payne, 1980 ). Using this framework, sociological analyses of class mobility have consistently demonstrated the unequal opportunity chances that exist in modern capitalist societies—usually measured by comparing the absolute and relative rates of mobility between a person’s class of origin (in terms of parental occupation) and their class of destination (in terms of own occupation) within a set of socio-economic classes 1 ( Breen, 2004 ). Yet in recent years a growing body of research has demonstrated that this conventional approach only provides a limited understanding of how class origin shapes inequality in professional career outcomes.

First, grouping all professions together obscures the fact that social mobility often varies substantially between professions ( Macmillan, Tyler and Vigoles, 2015 ; Stromme and Hansen, 2017 ). For example, in the UK, only 6% of doctors are from working-class backgrounds (meaning their main breadwinning parent did a routine or manual occupation) whereas the figure among engineers is considerably higher at 22% ( Friedman and Laurison, 2019 ).

Second, this dominant lens has meant that the conceptualization of social mobility has largely been tied to the idea of occupational access—who gets in rather than who gets on . Yet recent studies have shown that even when those from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering professional occupations, they go on to receive significantly lower incomes on average than their privileged colleagues. Such a class-origin pay gap has now been documented in a range of national contexts, including Britain, the USA, Canada, France, Norway, Sweden and Australia ( Hansen, 2001 ; Dinovitzer, 2011 ; Mastekaasa, 2011 ; Torche, 2011 ; Hällsten, 2013 ; Falcon and Bataille, 2018 ; Friedman and Laurison, 2019 ). While some studies attribute this inequality to fine-grained differences in educational attainment ( Hällsten, 2013 ; Torche, 2018 ), other studies find that class pay gaps remain substantial even after adjusting for class-origin differences in education, demographics, work location, occupational sorting and supposedly ‘meritocratic’ measures of ‘human capital’ such as experience, training and hours worked ( Hansen, 2001 ; Ljunggren, 2016 ; Falcon and Bataille, 2018 ; Friedman and Laurison, 2019 ).

Recently scholars have deepened this literature on class-origin pay gaps by investigating the mechanisms underlying this inequality. Here most have begun with the observation that class-origin income gaps are not necessarily driven by those from working-class backgrounds earning less for doing the same work (that is, for doing jobs at the same level, same company and same department) but more that they are less likely reach the most senior or lucrative positions—i.e., they face a ‘class ceiling’ ( Toft, 2019 ; Toft and Friedman, 2020 ; Ingram and Joohyun, 2022 ).

Some have attributed this vertical segregation less to the nature of professions themselves and more to ‘supply-side’ factors. For example, a range of studies have underlined how the careers of those from privileged-class backgrounds tend to be propelled by the inherited economic and social capital they bring into the workplace, and the overconfident, narcissistic, rule-breaking and entitled self-beliefs they exhibit once there ( Cote, 2011 ; Cote et al., 2021 ; Hansen and Toft, 2021 ). Fang and Tilcsuk (2022) have recently argued that another key mechanism is that people from upper-class origins tend to opt for professions with greater autonomy such as economics, which tend to be higher-paying, whereas their working-class counterparts tend to opt for more prosocial and less lucrative areas such as nursing and social work.

Yet significantly for this essay, there are also many scholars who attribute the class ceiling to ‘demand-side’ factors—i.e., to the structure, culture and systems of hiring and progression within professions ( Ingram and Allen, 2019 ). In particular, this work has identified two key mechanisms; cultural matching and intra-occupational sorting. First, drawing on Bourdeiusian theory, many have demonstrated that recruitment and progression processes at the most prestigious and lucrative professional employers tend to favour the already-privileged ( Cook, Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2012 ; Spence et al., 2017a ; Giazitzoglu and Muzio, 2021 ). For example, examining US professional service firms, Rivera (2016) shows that, first, top firms eliminate nearly every applicant who did not attend an elite college or university. They then put applicants through a series of ‘informal’ recruitment activities, such as cocktail parties and mixers, that are generally uncomfortable and unfamiliar to those from working-class backgrounds. Finally, when formal interviews happen, selectors often eschew formal criteria and evaluate candidates more on how at ease they seem, whether they build rapport in the interview, and whether they share common interests. Rivera describes this process as ‘cultural matching’ ( Rivera, 2016 ).

In a UK context, Ashley and Empson (2013) have found similar dynamics among elite firms operating in law, accountancy and banking—particularly those situated in the City (of London). In particular, they highlight how recruiters routinely misrecognize as ‘talent’ classed performances of ‘cultural display’. For example, recruiters seek a ‘polished’ appearance, strong debating skills and a confident manner, traits they argue can be closely traced back to middle-class upbringings.

Second, in my own work with Daniel Laurison ( Friedman and Laurison, 2019 ; Friedman, 2022 ), where we use mixed methods to compare class ceiling effects within the UK civil service, a national television broadcaster and a multinational accountancy firm, we find that a key mechanism across all firms is a distinct pattern of intra-occupational sorting. Specifically, we show that those from advantaged class backgrounds tend to both sort into, and are more readily rewarded within, work areas or departments characterised by heightened ‘knowledge ambiguity’ such as television commissioning, financial advisory and government policy work ( Alvesson, 2001 ; Ashley and Empson, 2013 ). In these areas, the success of the ‘final ‘product’ is often impossible to foretell, and therefore the knowledge and expertise of the professional tend to be particularly uncertain. What is used to plug this, our analysis suggests, is a certain performance or image of competence that is rooted in the embodied cultural capital (modes of comportment, self-presentation and aesthetic style) inculcated via a privileged-class background. Significantly, these work areas or departments also tend to be of higher status and afford more opportunities for progression to the most senior positions. In contrast, we find that those from working-class backgrounds tend to explicitly sort out of such knowledge-ambiguous areas and instead opt for, and progress quicker, in more technical (but less propulsive) work areas such as operational delivery where they perceive the skillset to be more transparent.

These various demand-side studies are significant because they suggest that professions do not just reflect existing class inequalities but, in certain important ways, can actively exacerbate their impact.

Can professions be part of the solution?

Despite the growing evidence base on class pay gaps and class ceilings, efforts to address such inequalities within the professions lag behind, particularly in comparison to gender and ethnicity. Indeed, in most countries, class or socio-economic background remain entirely absent from the organisational agendas of professional employers ( The Council of Europe, 2022 ). Only in the UK are there potential tentative grounds for optimism. Here, in recent years, discussions of the class have become commonplace across a range of professional sectors and a range of actions are beginning to take place.

For example, there is now a widespread collection of workforce data on class or socio-economic background—using a common methodology (see Social Mobility Commission, 2021 ). This has allowed employers to understand their internal class composition, class pay gap and class ceiling, but also to see how the class backgrounds of their staff intersect with other characteristics such as race and gender. Such advances are already generating insights. For example, recent work in the UK civil service has identified that women from working-class backgrounds often face a distinct double disadvantage in career progression ( Social Mobility Commission, 2021 ).

The collection of workforce data is also increasingly allowing firms and organizations to benchmark against others in their profession. This has led to growing recognition that positive change in removing barriers largely requires collective responsibility and collaborative action across a profession. Indeed, firms across the accountancy, legal, engineering and financial services professions in the UK have all begun to work in concert to tackle class-origin gaps in career progression (see, e.g., Bridge Group, 2018 , 2020 ). Indeed, many firms have taken the important step of publishing socio-economic data publicly and some, such as KPMG, PWC, and the BBC, have even gone further, setting targets to increase the representation of those from working-class backgrounds at partner or senior management level ( Timmins, 2021 ; Simpson, 2022 ).

Beyond data, though, there is much more than professional employers must do to be part of the solution. The most significant of these is to grapple with the most significant driver of class ceilings; how ‘talent’ and ‘merit’ is defined and rewarded in the workplace. The key point in the literature on this is that the identification of merit is often intertwined with the way merit is performed (in terms of classed self-presentation and arbitrary behavioural codes) and who the decision-makers are whose job it is to recognize and reward these attributes. This is a thorny issue that is hard to tackle, especially where there is contestation within professions about what merit or skill looks like. Yet I would argue that professions must embrace this contestation, to critically interrogate the ‘objective’ measures of merit they rely on, to think carefully about whether such measures have a performed dimension, and to what extent they can be reliably connected to demonstrable output or performance. The goal here should surely be more transparent and widely agreed upon idea of what merit looks like in the professional workplace.

There are certainly, then, some concrete ways that professions are tackling class inequality or may do in the near future. But at the same time, I want to conclude by registering an important caveat to the celebratory narratives that often surround professional employers’ social mobility strategies. This is simply that the interventions they envisage may be a necessary part of tackling class inequality in professions, but they are certainly not sufficient . This, fundamentally, is because they only address one aspect of class inequality; namely, equality of opportunity and the fair allocation of rewards within the workplace. But as a range of sociologists has argued ( Lawler, 2017 ; Littler, 2018 ) this narrow focus on social mobility is not, and cannot be, the solution to class inequality. Indeed, as Ingram and Gamsu (2022) have recently pointed out, discussions about the relationship between professions and inequality must engage with the work professionals do , as well as who they are . Here they point to the paradox that the professional firms taking class most seriously, internally, are arguably the same ones accentuating class inequalities in the work they do externally . For example, over the last 30 years, The Big Four professional service firms have been both involved in, and profited from, the privatization and outsourcing of public services and state-owned companies in the UK. This, Ingram and Gamsu (2022) argue, has had direct knock-on effects on people in working-class jobs—including the erosion of working conditions, lowering rates of pay, the loss of defined benefit pensions and increasing casualization of employment (see also Hermann and Flecker, 2013 ). Similarly, as Ashley (2021) notes, many professions are directly implicated in driving the kind of high pay that has contributed so profoundly to growing income inequality in many Western countries.

In this way, it is clearly important to recognise that organizational social mobility agendas sometimes act as a form of cultural legitimation, allowing professional employers to align themselves with egalitarian values while obscuring their role in perpetrating class inequalities in society more broadly. A more productive approach, I would suggest, would be for the ‘class agenda’ in the professions to focus not just on social mobility but more broadly on class or socio-economic inequality. Indeed, there is already a potential blueprint for this in the UK in the form of the ‘Socioeconomic Duty’ contained within the Equality Act 2010. This section both speaks to the equality of opportunity in making class origin a protected characteristic (meaning it would be against the law to discriminate against someone on the basis of class origin), but also goes significantly further, requiring government and all public bodies to have ‘due regard for ‘reducing inequalities of outcome, especially as they relate to socio-economic disadvantage’. While successive governments have declined to bring this section into effect, perhaps it is high time the professions stepped in to fill the gap.

Louise Ashley

Inequality is a pressing problem for economies throughout the world and professions, especially ‘elite’ PSFs, are closely implicated. This partly relates to their role in supporting a form of financialised capitalism which helps concentrate wealth, though entrenched organizational systems and structures play a role. Compensation practices are important as very high pay for professionals in ‘top jobs’ contributes to significant income inequalities in the UK ( Amis et al., 2018 : see also IFS, 2022 ). Elite PSFs are also the sites of institutionalized practices which contribute to the marginalization of under-represented groups. One recent study found that in leading UK law firms over 50% of partners are white, male and privately educated, compared to 7% of the population who attend fee-paying schools ( Bridge Group, 2020 ). Collectively, these statistics contradict the narrative of merit historically deployed by professions to help justify high pay. As these imbalances have been exposed this has contributed to reputational pressures and many PSFs have felt compelled to act, most recently by making efforts to open access on the basis of social class, which is my main focus here ( Ashley, 2021, 2022 ; Cabinet Office, 2010 ; SMC, 2015 ).

Since elite professions both reflect and reproduce steep status hierarchies in society at large, this might seem an encouraging development, still more so if, as a result, elite PSFs can help tackle wider societal inequalities via interventions aimed at promoting upward social mobility. This is certainly how organizational leaders position this agenda, and as a way in which professions can live up to their professed commitment to merit, but these claims should be treated with caution. Elsewhere, I have argued that interventions introduced by elite PSFs aimed at addressing classed barriers to entry provide an illusion of change which legitimates and thus sustains the wider inequalities these firms help to create ( Ashley, 2021, 2022 ). In what follows, I describe a closely related challenge, to suggest the conceptual tools currently used most often to understand and address these inequalities (tools, I should say, I have regularly used myself) are inadequate for the task, both as they reflect the wider ‘cultural turn’ in sociology, and more specifically, borrow from the work of Bourdieu (e.g., 1977 , 1984 , 1990 ).

This might seem surprising given that Bourdieu is often considered the preeminent sociologist of the twentieth century. To provide some context, while Marx believed class was determined by our relationship to the means of production, and by economic wealth or cash , and Weber underlined how credentials could improve life chances for individuals and collective mobility for discrete status groups, Bourdieu’s emphasis was on culture . He argued that an individual’s position in the social field is determined by their portfolio of economic, social and cultural capital, along with the socio-cultural outlook comprising habitus. The latter relates to inherited and internalized dispositions which influence actors to unconsciously enact practices and behaviours which ensure (dis)advantage is reproduced. This framework has been widely used to explore who gets ahead in elite professions and how (e.g., Friedman and Laurison, 2019 ; Sommerlad, 2011 ), and to show how aspirant professionals from less advantaged backgrounds are blocked from entry, or are sorted (and sort themselves) into specific roles, on the basis of their portfolio of capital and perceived cultural ‘fit’ (e.g., Cook, Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2012 ; Ashley and Empson, 2013 , 2017 ; Rivera, 2016 ). This body of work is not only academic but, as part of more engaged sociology, has helped generate wider awareness of the profession’s problem with class, and provided a foundation from which elite firms and other organisations have designed solutions, as I will show.

If accurate analysis of a problem is necessary for effective action, this may seem a positive development. However, in what follows, I make two main points. First, I argue that Bourdieu’s core concepts have been selectively applied in practical interventions, contributing to their superficial effect. Second, I raise a more fundamental challenge, as while Bourdieu theorized inequalities within capitalism he did not theorise capitalism itself, and one result is that he offered no meaningful theory of change ( Riley, 2017 ). In the next section, I provide some brief contextual information before expanding on these arguments and considering the conceptual tools which might work better instead.

Classed inequalities and professional culture

During the 1990s and into the early 2000s, social class largely disappeared from the policy agenda in the UK, as successive administrations championed a new age of meritocracy where education rather than background would determine opportunities. Towards the end of that period, it became increasingly evident that this optimism was misplaced. An important moment for the professions was the release of the Cabinet Office publication in 2010: ‘ Unleashing Aspiration; The Final Report of the Panel on Fair Access to the Professions .’ This reported that younger professionals (born in 1970) typically grew up in a family with an income 27% above that of the average family, compared with 17% for older professionals (born in 1958), and that, despite formal recruitment techniques and the expansion of higher education over the past 30 years, elite professions had become increasingly closed, stifling opportunities for upward social mobility. In 2012, the Conservative government set up the Social Mobility Commission (SMC) to help report on and stimulate change and this was followed by a raft of related reports and studies many of which used frameworks provided by Bourdieu. Two examples include studies I led for the SMC in 2015 and 2016 exploring barriers to access in law and accountancy, and investment banking, which explained how recruitment and selection processes offer systematic advantages to young people from more privileged backgrounds with the ‘right’ portfolio of cultural and social capital, whose prior socialisation offered them confidence that they ‘fit.’

Efforts to address this situation are part of a ‘social mobility industry’ in the UK ( Payne, 2017 ), one arm of which is represented by increasing numbers of not-for-profit and charitable bodies such as the Social Mobility Foundation (SMF), UpReach and The Sutton Trust. These organisations work with leading professional and financial service firms as partners and funders to identify talented young people from under-represented backgrounds and offer them training in soft skills, along with mentoring and internships. The immediate aims are to extend participants’ social networks (social capital), help them acquire behaviours and mannerisms often summarized within the professions as ‘polish’ (cultural capital), and provide them with opportunities to familiarize themselves with professional environments (attending most obviously to habitus). Thousands of young people have now taken part, supported by leading names such as investment bank J.P Morgan, big four accountancy firms such as EY and KPMG, and magic circle law firms, such as Allen & Overy and Freshfields.

For individual participants, these programmes are often considered life-changing ( Ashley, 2022 ), yet overall, there is limited evidence of significantly improved outcomes for under-represented groups (e.g., IFS, 2021 ). This takes me to the first of my two main critiques, which is to suggest that the limited impact of social mobility programmes can be partly explained as a Bourdieusian framework has been selectively applied.

To expand on this point, Bourdieu explained how everyday practices can only be understood by using all three of his interlocking conceptual tools: habitus, capital and field. However, as applied to professional practice aimed at opening access, the focus has predominantly been on correcting assumed deficits in individual portfolios of capital and much less on exclusionary structures that define the field. This contributes to a cosmetic effect as interventions of this type can only assist a talented few, and only if they become quite similar to existing elites, yet assimilation of this type is difficult for many and impossible for some, including because, as Reay (2017) points out, class is not a ‘cloak’ that can be taken on and off. It is no coincidence perhaps that this approach sits comfortably within the wider diversity agenda, currently the dominant approach to workplace inequalities in the professions as elsewhere, but one which has a similarly superficial effect. This may seem paradoxical since the diversity agenda was forged in the very neoliberalism that Bourdieu railed against. However, as just one example of where they overlap, diversity situates ‘unconscious bias’ as the primary explanation for workplace inequalities, while Bourdieu also argued that everyday practices enacted by individuals originate in unconscious beliefs and habits. While starting from different ideological positions, both make the locus of power diffuse, and position unfair outcomes as simultaneously everybody and thus nobody’s fault, to obscure what or who we are struggling against and undermine our capacity to mount a moral critique of the current social order.

There is, though, a second and more comprehensive critique, starting from the position that while Bourdieu’s politics were radical, his sociology is not ( Riley, 2017 ). Criticism of this type has generally been launched from a Marxist perspective and the many points of (dis)connection between the two are far beyond the scope of this piece. However, while Bourdieu sought to bridge the structure/agency divide, Wright (2009 , p. 106) argues that using his framework, social position can be interpreted as largely the outcome of individual actions rather than structural conditions and further, that: ‘the rich are rich because they have favourable attributes, the poor because they lack them.’ While Bourdieu underlines the relativity of social position, this differs from Weberian and Marxist approaches which show in more depth how classed inequalities are relational , are sustained by the (sometimes conscious) exercise of power, and that successful struggles would necessarily threaten the privileges of those in advantaged positions. In contrast, and as Wright (2009) points out, Bourdieu failed to theorize a systemic causal connection between who is rich and who is poor, or properly address the workings of power and thus his work can support a position suggesting that inequalities can be reduced simply by ‘improving’ the culture and education of disadvantaged groups.

It is then especially significant that it is not Marx or Weber who inform the profession’s efforts at reducing inequalities, but the work of Bourdieu, or that these efforts are also regularly positioned by firm leaders as in some sense ‘win-win,’ for both talented young people and elite PSFs. In practice, where opportunities are not expanding in absolute terms, progress would require weakening the privilege of existing elites, but there has been little sign of that. These failures may however explain precisely why a definition of ‘class as culture’ is so attractive to professional elites, as where the problem of inequality is defined as cultural domination, and where the class is considered a subjective identity rather than an objective ‘fact,’ this plays into the hands of current elites. First, because related interventions offer useful reputational capital to existing elites, with no requirement that they should share their material rewards or give anything up. Second, because underlying structural inequalities inherent to our current model of financialized capitalism, within which elite PSFs are closely implicated, are conveniently overlooked in favour of the mistaken (but legitimized) belief that cultural change can deliver progress without radical adjustments to the system itself. In short, as it has filtered into practice, Bourdieu’s conceptual blind spot with respect to the structural relations of capitalism has arguably helped protect the interests of existing professional elites and thus sustain related material inequalities of income and wealth.

Against this broad backdrop, Burawoy (2019 , p. 196) notes that intellectuals who promote Bourdieu’s ideas (after all, ‘professionals’ too) have become: ‘a vehicle for the reproduction of capitalism by suppressing the very idea of capitalism and failing to project an alternative beyond capitalism’. Of course, related failures do not mean Bourdieu’s framework should be abandoned but to properly understand and address inequalities of any type we must get to their root cause. In the current context, this could include further efforts to expose how elite professionals maintain their privilege via power relations which operate at the expense of people who are poor, and how the ‘solutions’ elite PSFs implement might sustain the very problem of inequality they help to create. As Wright suggests (2009), demystification of this sort requires a holistic approach, combining not only Weber with Bourdieu but also returning to Karl Marx, whose insights on exploitation and inequality are less fashionable perhaps but remain relevant, nevertheless.

Mehdi Boussebaa

This essay addresses this forum’s two core questions—how the professions exacerbate inequality and whether can they be part of the solution—by focusing on the issue of global inequality. By ‘global inequality’, I am referring to the socio-economic unevenness that exists between the Global North (aka the ‘developed world’) and the Global South (aka the ‘developing world’). This unevenness is rooted in Western colonialism and, despite decolonization, remains a core feature of the world economy. I will argue, first, that the professions exacerbate such inequalities through the ‘so-called global professional service firms’ (hereafter GPSFs) to which they have given rise. Second, I will argue that these organizations are unlikely to be part of the solution, although they may inadvertently engender conditions to that end. Given the scarcity of studies on the topic, my argument is inevitably tentative and exploratory, but, I hope, will catalyse future research.

GPSFs as agents of global inequality

It is now well established that the rise of GPSFs has been one the most significant changes in the contemporary landscape of the professions ( Faulconbridge and Muzio, 2012 ) and that these firms have become ‘global’ in large part to serve multinational enterprises (MNEs) across the globe ( Beaverstock, Smith and Taylor, 1999 ; Greenwood et al., 2010 ). What has tended to be overlooked, however, is that MNE clients, the largest of which have until recently been almost exclusively headquartered in the Global North, have been a major agent of global inequality (see, e.g., Petras and Veltmeyer, 2007 ; Smith, 2016 ). This is perhaps most visible in the global production networks (GPNs) that they control. These networks of course provide some economic benefits to countries in the Global South but, as Buckley and Strange (2015 : 244) put it,

the (increased) profits from the dispersed value-chain activities will accrue to the shareholders of the MNEs. The overall impact on income in the host emerging economies will be limited, while the MNEs’ shareholders (predominantly in the advanced economies) will generally profit from these overseas ventures in the long term […]. Global inequalities in the distribution of income may thus be exacerbated as a result.

In-depth and historically informed analyses of GPNs and multinational enterprise more broadly are far more critical (e.g., Smith, 2016 ; Suwandi, 2019 ). They reveal extreme forms of labour exploitation and dire social and environmental consequences in the Global South—the Rana Plaza disaster springs to mind here. Importantly, these analyses enable us to see the ‘big picture’ by contextualizing global inequalities within a long-term process that has been central to the development of capitalism, namely, colonialism. This, then, helps in seeing how the activities of MNEs result in not just large-scale transfers of income from the South to the North but also continuing patterns of unequal exchange and uneven development in the world economy. GPSFs may be deeply implicated in this process given their raison d’être is to serve MNEs.

Indeed, since the 1990s, GPSFs have been offering a growing suite of offshore outsourcing services (see, e.g., Silver and Daly, 2007 ), i.e., services specifically designed to enhance Northern MNEs’ ability to access and exploit the vast low-wage labour pools of the Global South. Related services are also offered to Southern supplier firms seeking to participate in this process, often to the detriment of domestic workforces. For instance, Munir et al.’s (2018) study of GPNs in the clothing industry reveals the role of US consultants in shaping the thinking and practices of Pakistani suppliers towards forms of management that ‘protected the interests of western branded apparel companies and consumers, but did not necessarily serve the interests of workers’ (p. 561).

Additionally, GPSFs such as accounting firms may be exacerbating global inequality through the tax services which they offer to MNEs, among other clients. A growing body of literature suggests accountancies may be facilitating tax evasion on a massive scale ( Sikka and Hampton, 2005 ; Sikka and Willmott, 2013 ; see also Hearson, 2021 ; Seabrooke and Wigan, 2022 ). Such malpractice is a drain on the resources of most societies, but Southern countries are particularly vulnerable, not least because they lack the resources to understand and combat Northern tax avoidance strategies ( Sikka and Willmott, 2013 ; see also Hearson, 2021 ). The literature suggests that GPSFs may be enabling complex tax avoidance schemes that result in the Global South being stripped of US$100 billion of tax revenue each year. Such revenue, as Sikka and Willmott (2013) put it, ‘could be used to provide, sanitation, security, clean water, education, healthcare, pensions and social infrastructure to improve the quality of life for millions of people’ (p. 420).

Interestingly, GPSFs also appear to be reproducing North-South inequalities within their own organizational boundaries. Northern professionals generally ‘own’ the most lucrative client relationships and capture the bulk of the profits earned from the global projects which they deliver on behalf of Northern MNEs ( Boussebaa, 2015a ; Rose and Hinings, 1999 ). This unequal distribution of income is exacerbated by the tremendous cross-national fee-rate differentials that exist within GPSFs—Northern professionals generally command fees that are far higher than those that accrue to colleagues in the Global South. This also often results in the former capturing large chunks of the profits generated through projects led by the latter. Boussebaa (2009 : 843) illustrates this drawing on an interview with a London-based manager working within the consulting division of a major American GPSF. The manager commented that he alone earned more than 23% of the total earned from a large project run by his firm’s Polish office: ‘In Poland, my project [a project for which assistance from the UK was requested] was £3.2 million and I think I accounted for about £750,000 of that £3.2 million – just one resource’. 2

These internal dynamics suggest that, as I have argued elsewhere, GPSFs may be ‘institutionalizing internal hierarchies that mirror the long-standing core/periphery hierarchy of the world capitalist system’ ( Boussebaa, 2017 : 234). Such hierarchies are also reflected in and indeed (in part) enabled by organizational arrangements that generally protect, prioritise and advance the interests of Northern professionals. Note, for instance, how the top leadership teams of GPSFs are mostly, if not exclusively, composed of professionals based in the West ( Boussebaa, 2015a , b)—typically, ‘white, heterosexual, middle-class males’ ( Empson et al., 2015 : 14). Note also how GPSFs have developed global knowledge management systems that, among other things, serve to promote and export Northern knowledge—generally at great cost to Southern colleagues ( Boussebaa, Sturdy and Morgan, 2014 ).

Aside from client services and intra-organizational processes, GPSFs reproduce global inequality by shaping the rules governing international trade and investment in ways that align with their priorities. Arnold’s (2005) study of globalization in the accounting sector is particularly useful here. It reveals significant efforts by Anglo-American accounting firms (together with Northern industry lobbies), supported by the World Trade Organization, to use international trade agreements towards the creation of a global market for their services. The study also shows how the legal and institutional arrangements produced by such efforts can ‘trump domestic laws to the disadvantage of developing nations by pre-empting laws designed to protect indigenous accounting industries, and by instituting transparency rules [… that give accounting firms] access to and a voice in the rulemaking deliberations of smaller nations’ ( Arnold, 2005 : 323). Further insights on such neo-colonial dynamics can be found in various sociological studies examining sustained efforts by networks of Northern actors, including professionals, to reshape Southern societies in congruence with the goals and preferences of the former (e.g., Dezalay and Garth, 2002 ; Halliday and Carruthers, 2009 ; see also Boussebaa, 2022 ; Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, 2019 ).

In sum, it is fair to suggest that the professions exacerbate global inequality through the global firms to which they have given rise. Of course, the set of arguments put forward above provides a schematic representation of global inequality and the role of GPSFs in its reproduction. I do not mean to imply that the North-South divide is static or that the Global South, including Southern professionals, has no agency to change the status quo. The resurgence of China and India as major economic powers and the associated rise of large professional service firms in those countries is telling in that regard (a point I return to below). But such cases are exceptions and, as Lees’ (2021 : 85) recent systematic evaluation of the evidence on the question reveals, ‘North–South divisions have persisted […] despite decades of change within the international system’. My argument in this essay is that GPSFs contribute significantly to this persistence.

Prospects for addressing global inequality

The discussion above provides, in part, an answer to the second question motivating this forum: can the professions be part of the solution? The segment of the professions I have examined in this essay, GPSFs, lives off MNEs and the global inequality produced in that relationship; it is therefore difficult to imagine it being part of the solution. A GPSF working towards global equality would undermine its very raison d’etre and bring about its own demise.

Indeed, GPSFs not only reproduce global inequality but also actively work to hide it from view by propagating a sanitised narrative of ‘globalization’. In this narrative, colonialism—corporate-driven or state-managed—is a thing of the past and it, therefore, makes little sense to speak of a North-South divide today. As Keniche Ohmae, a former managing director of McKinsey, notoriously argued, we now live in a ‘borderless world’ and leading MNEs are no longer home-centric organizations seeking to appropriate the labour, markets and resources of the Global South. On the contrary, such organizations have become or are en route to becoming, ‘stateless’ and are a source of progress and development across the globe. Likewise, we are led to believe that GPSFs have themselves metamorphosed into post-colonial entities working to the benefit of humanity as a whole. In this way, the inequalities discussed above are glossed over.

That said, the process of GPSFs becoming global may also carry within it seeds for change towards reduced global inequality. Specialist studies of colonialism reveal that colonial projects have always been met with resistance—not just military but also economic and cultural. As Edward Said once put it in relation to European colonialism, ‘it was the case nearly everywhere in the non-European world that the coming of the white man brought forth some sort of resistance ( Said, 1994 : xii).’ It is worth quoting him at more length:

Along with armed resistance […], there also went considerable efforts in cultural resistance almost everywhere, the assertions of nationalist identities, and, in the political realm, the creation of associations and parties whose common goal was self-determination and national independence. Never was it the case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native […] and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance finally won out ( Said, 1994 : xii).

In the contemporary period, the intrusion of Northern MNEs and GPSFs, with the support of Northern governments and Northern-centric multilateral organizations, has itself been met with resistance. Note how, for example, Anglo-American corporate law firms are presently banned from opening offices in India, in part due to fears that, as Krishnan (2010 : 60) put it, ‘liberalizing the legal services sector would inevitably lead to India’s legal system being controlled by modern-day Western colonialists – something a country that suffered from centuries of imperial rule can never permit.’ But resistance may also occur in less obvious ways, through, for instance, Southern professionals setting up their own firms and becoming competitors. Chinese and Indian professionals have been particularly successful in this regard, but recent years have also seen the emergence of indigenous firms in economically less powerful nation-states. One example is Morocco-headquartered Bennani & Associés, which now has offices across various parts of North, West and Central Africa.

Needless to say, the rise of these firms requires critical scrutiny. On the one hand, they may be seen as a manifestation of resistance and move towards more equality in the world system. And, in some instances, Southern governments have played a determining role in that regard, as seen in the case of China, which has actively encouraged the development of indigenous firms as part of a wider state-managed project of economic emancipation and growth. On the other hand, it is possible that indigenous firms may simply be serving the interests of dominant Northern GPSFs, providing them with local advice and networks towards further expansion into the Global South (see, e.g., Dezalay and Garth, 2012 ). All the same, the growth of these firms suggests that Southern professionals, with appropriate support from Southern states, may well have it within their means in the 21st century to help tackle the global inequality that GPSFs have contributed to extending into the 20th century and beyond.

In sum, GPSFs seem to play a crucial role in the reproduction of global inequality and a solution to the problem is more likely to come from the Global South than the firms themselves or indeed the wider system of professions which has given rise to them. I, therefore, conclude this essay with a call for further research into not only the role of GPSFs (and Southern collaborators) in reproducing North-South inequalities but also, importantly, that played by Southern professionals in addressing the problem.

Brooke Harrington

The two motivating questions of this forum—how do professions contribute to inequality and how can they be part of the solution—can be answered with a single statement: it depends on whose behalf the professions are working. Thus, this essay offers two theses about the relationship of professions to inequality. The first is that professions exacerbate inequality by using their expertise to profit at their clients’ expense—as in Gürses and Danışman’s study of physicians ( 2021 )—or by amplifying the fortunes and power of an elite clientele, such as the high-net-worth individuals served by wealth managers running the offshore financial system ( Harrington 2015 , 2017 ). Thesis two is that the professions can undo some of the damage they have done in exacerbating inequality by returning to their original responsibility: to serve the public interest with their expertise ( Adams, 2017 ). The remainder of this essay will elaborate on these points.

Experts exacerbating inequality

For centuries, societies have given a small group of experts’ special privileges, such as authority and autonomy, in return for their pledge to use those skills for the advancement of the common good. The concept of a common good generally includes the notion of equal opportunity, such as via equitable access to professional services like education and medical care—along with equal opportunity to enter the professions themselves ( Dobbin, 2009 ). Enforcing this commitment is the purpose of professional associations and state licensing boards; they establish standards for quality and ethics, as well as for sanctions on misconduct. Professions have been entrusted with self-governance on the understanding—usually made explicit in their codes of conduct—that practitioners would use their powers exclusively in the public interest ( Adams, 2017 ).

However, a series of recent events represent profound betrayals of that ancient social contract. As this essay is being written, some of the most high-status professionals in the world are being sanctioned for their role in the most recent Russian invasion of Ukraine. Non-military efforts to counter the invasion have highlighted the roles of attorneys, accountants and bankers—primarily in the UK, the US and key European jurisdictions, such as Switzerland and Monaco—in helping Russian oligarchs amass the vast stores of offshore wealth and proceeds of corruption underwriting the war ( Croft 2022 ; Gross 2022 ).

Many have seen in recent news reports the oligarchs’ mega-yachts and luxury properties being seized as part of sanctions regimes; they may not realize that these stores of wealth are the products of skilled professional interventions, or that the by-product of those interventions is the immiseration of Russia, where 20% of the population lacks indoor plumbing and life expectancy is dropping fast ( AFP, 2022 ; Moscow Times, 2019 ). Both the extreme wealth and extreme poverty are products of wealth management draining the resources of a nation into the pockets of a tiny few ( Harrington, 2016 ).

Lawmakers in the US and the UK have just banned this use of expert knowledge by imposing export controls on professional corporate, public relations and financial services to Russian oligarchs; the EU is considering a similar ban ( Jolly, 2022 ; Wingrove, 2022 ). This is an unusual policy move, drawing from defence ministry regulations typically imposed on the transfer of data deemed important to national security and technology related to nuclear, chemical and biological weaponry ( McGowan 2008 ). That such rules are now being applied to corporate, communications and financial services suggests that the economic and political inequality some professionals have created is now recognized as a threat to international security and stability.

The 2 years prior to the invasion of Ukraine witnessed similarly destabilizing and socio-economically destructive activity in the healthcare professions, contributing to stark health inequalities where physicians, nurses and pharmacists disseminated disinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic ( Harrington, 2021 ). A recent Dutch study found that such disinformation increased inequality not only in health outcomes, but in economic terms: individuals exposed to COVID-19 disinformation were more likely to get the virus, experienced more job loss, declines in income and a ‘myriad of negative life outcomes’ ( van Prooijen et al., 2021 ).

In several noteworthy cases, healthcare professionals’ misuse of expert authority and self-governance appears to have been driven by economic self-interest (e.g., Frenckel, 2021 ). As investigative reporting and scholarly research have documented, there is a great deal of money to be made in selling conspiracy theories and quack ‘treatments’ ( Freckelton, 2020 ). The trend of commercialization of the professions, drawing practitioners away not just from public service but from service in their own clients’ interests, has been well-documented in fields such as law ( Hanlon, 1999 ), accountancy ( Spence and Carter, 2014 ) and management consultancy ( Maestripieri, 2019 ). As the pandemic has made tragically evident, the same affliction appears to beset healthcare, as well.

One reason such abuses of public trust have created such extreme inequality in domains ranging from economics to politics to health has been the failure of professions to uphold their obligation of self-governance and the seeming inability of national and local governments to step into the breach ( Bierman et al., 2019 ). Professional associations in a wide variety of fields have remained largely silent and inert as their members have pushed the boundaries of ethics and even legality (e.g., Edwards, 2021 ), creating a ‘culture of leniency’ in which practitioners simply decline to punish each other, even when the evidence of misconduct is strong ( Edwards and Hart, 2020 ). More broadly, scholars have identified a reluctance by professionals in many fields to sanction misconduct in fellow practitioners (e.g., Gabbioneta, Prakash and Greenwood, 2014 ), pointing to what may be a fatal flaw in the logic of self-governance.

In many fields, professional ethics investigations, sanctions and license revocations have declined significantly in the past decade (e.g., FSMB, 2021 ); in some cases, such as that of the legal profession, this decline has occurred despite an increase in complaints ( ABA, 2018 ). The robust self-protective measures professions were expected to take, in order to safeguard their position of public trust, have mostly failed to materialize when it came to imposing standards and sanctions on members. In the healthcare professions, this has been attributed to a mismatch between the nature of the problem—spreading COVID-19 disinformation to millions of strangers via social media—and the formulation of professional sanctions, which are designed to punish practitioners who fail in their obligations to specific individuals under their care ( Rubin, 2022 ). A similar mismatch afflicts the law: even though attorneys can be sanctioned for displays of bad character and ‘moral turpitude’ that would tend to bring the profession into disrepute, ‘professional discipline for spreading disinformation is possible but rare’ ( Wyman and Heavenrich, 2022 ). This gap in the conception and application of sanctions is becoming a serious problem in an era of social media monetization and the growing role of legal disinformation in fomenting political, economic and health inequality ( Harrington, 2021 ).

At the same time, because national and local governments have acceded to professions’ demand for self-governance, lawmakers seem to lack the information and the will needed to impose effective oversight and punishments from outside ( Leicht, 2016 ). On the contrary, having delegated key regulatory functions to professions and corporations, many governments seem to have abdicated their position of protecting the public interest ( Harrington 2016 ; Christensen, 2021 ). Ironically, as politics itself has become more professionalized, the quest for votes and financial support—including from powerful professional bodies—seems to have rendered state actors even less willing to arrest or counteract the multiple forms of inequality created by contemporary professionals ( Spence et al., 2017b ).

Prospects for undoing the damage

In one sense, to speak of professions being part of a solution to inequality is absurd. As Andrew Abbott (1988) pointed out decades ago, professions are premised on social closure, exclusivity and the monopoly of knowledge and practice. Inequality is thus built into the very concept of a profession, all the way down to the micro-level expressions of proper habitus, in which wearing the right colour socks and shoes can be make-or-break factors in advancement ( Ashley and Empson, 2013 ). We know from dozens of studies that the professions are a highly efficient machine for reproducing inequality ( Harrington, 2012 ): why would anyone think that they could ameliorate a problem they had a central role in creating? As the late American poet and essayist Audre Lorde famously put it, ‘the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’ ( 1984 ).

Since, as the first part of this essay reviewed, professions reproduce and exacerbate inequality by serving the interests of elites, let us acknowledge up front that that problem is not going away. Wealthy and powerful people need medical care, legal advice, accountancy and other professional services just like the rest of us; since they are already atop many hierarchies, they are likely to stay in that position thanks to the experts advising them. But what if the professions just served everyone else better? What if we took seriously again the old bargain that professions must serve the common good, not just their clients and themselves?

In theory, institutions such as the state can compel professions to serve the public interest; some states do this better than others, for instance, by mandating national healthcare programs or tuition-free access to university education. But in practice, relying on institutions seems increasingly fanciful in an environment of growing ‘regulatory capture’, in which professionals bend law, policy and regulation to serve private interests—often in direct conflict with the public good ( Carpenter and Moss, 2013 ). However, normative change from the micro or grassroots level has always been a source of dynamism in the professions ( Muzio, Brock and Suddaby, 2013 ). Examples include physicians negotiating new professional roles through relational identity work ( Reay et al., 2017 ) and accountants engaging in their own professional reframing projects via Twitter ( Suddaby, Saxton and Gunz, 2015 ). Thus, just as shifting norms moved the professions away from public service ( Gorman and Sandefur, 2011 ), the same forces can move them back.

It bears mentioning in this context that professions and professional associations originate in the medieval religious collegium ( Turner, 1992 ). That means the professions’ raison d’etre derives not from rules of law but from moral imperatives. The 14th-century ‘colleges’ from which occupational guilds formed were once composed of ‘secular clergy’—individuals who did not take holy vows or live in a religious institute like a monastery, but who nonetheless served their communities in the name of a higher calling ( Herbermann et al., 1911 ). Over time, the colleges that became guilds succeeded in their struggle to become fully secular and free of religious authorities, but they retained the core mission of public service ( Krause, 1996 ). The ideal type of professional derives from this secularized model, as conveyed in the title given to French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s famous series of lectures on the subject, ‘ Professional Ethics and Civic Morals ’ ( 1992 [1898-1900], emphasis mine).

This standard of professionalism is not a bygone relic: it remains alive and well, institutionalized in the under-researched form of the fiduciary role ( Marcus, 1983 ). Fiduciaries are a subset of professionals with special obligations to their clients enshrined in law: these include the duties of care and loyalty , which are defined respectively as prudence in business dealings and ‘unselfishness [and] the duty to refrain from exploiting the relationship for personal gain’ ( Boxx, 2012 : 239). Examples of contemporary professionals bound to the fiduciary standard include accountants, lawyers, corporate directors and trustees. In addition to the baseline demands of expertise applied to any professional, fiduciaries are also required to act with loyalty, honesty and good faith toward their clients and to avoid any conflicts of interest ( Parkinson, 2005 ). In a callback to the origins of the professions in the medieval religious collegium, the law regards fiduciary duty as akin to a sacred trust; as a result, breaches of that duty are punished more harshly than misconduct by other types of professionals ( Boxx, 2012 ).

Thus, fiduciaries in practice can and do integrate two seemingly incompatible institutional logics: those of public service and of commerce—the latter of which rewards enriching oneself and one’s clients at the expense of everyone else, leading to many of the profession-driven inequalities we observe today in the realms of wealth, health and politics ( Harrington and Strike, 2018 ). While some professionals have been captured by the logic of commerce ( Spence and Carter, 2014 ), fiduciaries represent an earlier era of professionalism, when integrity and reputation were paramount and expertise was used to assist clients rather than exploit them for profit. While their expert authority is compatible with the logic of commerce—being based on competence and a performance track record—their special obligations of loyalty, care and selfless service align fiduciaries closely with public service. This role for professionals was once termed ‘social trusteeship’ ( Marcus and Hall, 1992 ): a concept that defines elite privilege in terms of its obligations to advance the common good.

This suggests that the fiduciary model may be uniquely apt to lead the professions in undoing some of the destructive inequalities created by expertise in thrall to the commercial imperative. This model would also allow professions to live up to their potential as the great stabilizing force in secular capitalism, as envisioned by Durkheim (1992 [1898-1900]). Strangely, given the significance of fiduciaries as the historical link to the ‘civic morals’ tradition in the professions, there is virtually no research on these actors outside of niche publications in law review journals (e.g., Boxx, 2012 ) and seminal work in the anthropology of finance (e.g., Marcus, 1983 ). The Journal of Professions and Organization stands out as one of the only journals publishing work on this issue for a broad social scientific audience (e.g., Bierman et al., 2019 , 2015, 2017). This article will therefore conclude with a simple but urgent call to build on this record with more research on fiduciary professionals who represent a model on which the legitimacy and authority of expertise can be re-established, for the benefit of all.

This special topic forum has set out to stimulate debate on how professions may exacerbate existing societal inequalities, while also critically assessing their potential to offer solutions to tackling inequality as a grand challenge. In doing so, we show how professions’ scholarship critically interrogates extant understandings of inequality as a broad, multifaceted concept, whilst providing fruitful directions for research on inequality and its potential solutions, including the role and responsibilities of organization and management scholars. Based on the essays, we see at least four important ways in which professions’ research can inform theoretical scholarship on inequality and offer several propositions for practical change.

Unpacking the complexities of inequality via transparency-driven change?

The sub-plenary showed how professions’ research can contribute by exposing the complexity inherent to the relevant mechanisms and dynamics driving inequality: first, by investigating supply-side resources and dispositions (e.g., professional workers inherited social and economic capitals) in addition to demand-side processes (e.g., cultural matching and intra-occupational sorting); and second, by analysing variance across professions. Furthermore, we also complemented studies on access to professions with a focus on internal progression . Specifically, as Friedman has argued, workforce data on the socio-economic background of professional organizations’ staff composition may contribute to theorizing how pay gaps and class ceilings may vary between organizations or sectors, or how the class may intersect with race and gender. This is in line with recent overviews that have emphasized the need to go beyond single-category explanations and better account for intersectionality ( Amis et al., 2021 ; Benschop, 2021 ; Janssens and Zanoni, 2021 ; Tomlinson et al, 2018 ). Disclosing workforce data may also serve a practical goal as it may enhance public awareness about inequalities and, as such, contribute to some form of political and collective pressure through enhancing transparency. Indeed, research has shown how PSFs seem increasingly inclined to make workforce data publicly available whilst using this to display their own goals and policies in addressing inequality. Yet, there is still little understanding of when and how such pressures may shape decision-makers’ attitudes towards inequality within and outside of their firms. In terms of an agenda for change, and based on Friedman, we see possibilities for better understanding how enhancing transparency through generating and disclosing data—both on what professions do internally and externally—may contribute to driving policy changes. At the same time, it is important to follow how and why these ‘policies designed to ensure greater equality’ ( Amis et al., 2021 , p. 432 are translated into organizational practice ( van Grinsven, Heusinkveld and Cornelissen, 2016 ) and how, in turn, these may lead to positive change (especially within the context of vast literature documenting policy failure in this area—see Ashley—in this piece and Ashley, 2022 ).

Radical change through broadening our theoretical toolkit and language to define inequality

Our collection also suggests additional conceptual tools to study inequality in the professions. In particular, Louise Ashley indicates that whilst, for instance, the work of Bourdieu is extremely useful, there has been the tendency to apply Bourdieusian concepts selectively, on the one hand, while failing to critically engage with its theoretical blind spots on the other. To counteract this limitation, research not only needs to better articulate the possibilities and limitations of prevailing socio-cultural explanations of inequality and their associated vocabulary (cf. Amis, 2021 ) but also consider alternatives. In particular, we need to pay more attention to theorising the role of dominant structures of capitalism ( Burawoy, 2019 ), emphasising how power relations work at the expense of the marginalised and adopting a more holistic theoretical approach by combing thinking of prominent sociologists and philosophers such as Max Weber, Karl Marx, Foucault as well as Pierre Bourdieu ( Wright, 2009 ). In other words, whilst scholars have more or less explicitly connected inequality to commercial pressures, Ashley’s essay provides important directions to explore how the system of financialized capitalism relates to inequality; suggesting that studying and addressing inequality is difficult without management and organizational scholars further developing a perspective and vocabulary of radical (system) change.

Extending geographical scope and internal resource-driven change

Responding to calls to develop understandings of inequality by studying organizations as value distributors ( Amis et al., 2021 ), Boussebaa provides an overview and critique of extant work on how GPSFs contribute to global inequality. In his essay, he shows how powerful GPSFs reproduce global inequality through processes of value distribution as well as through ‘new colonial practices’: (1) providing services to support powerful (MNE) clients undermining societies’ resources availability, (2) internally redistributing resources to advance priorities of Northern professionals within the firm and (3) influencing governments and legislations in line with their own interest. In line with Ashley’s position, he emphasizes the need to explore how institutionalized discourses of (positive) globalization are maintained and how these relate to professionals’ perception of their raison d’être as well as the way these are translated into organizational practices. Yet, rather than relying on external pressures, Boussebaa considers the possibilities of (radical) change arising from within professional organizations from the Global South. In particular, by arguing for Southern professions’ potential to engage in cultural and economic resistance to current western dominated value distribution regimes through insider activism, he highlights the need to better account for intra-organizational dissatisfaction with the status quo concerning the distribution of resources ( Greenwood and Hinings, 1996 ). Here, the role and responsibility of organizational scholars are to show how resources-driven changes regarding inequality in professional organizations from the grassroots level may constitute viable alternatives compared to top-level ones, particularly in the Global South.

Re-connecting with professional ethos and the case for normative change

While professions’ scholars have explored commercialization and the increased power of the client in the context of capitalist society (e.g., Gustafsson, Swart and Kinnie, 2018 ), Harrington sees possibilities for normative change emerging from the grassroots. Rather than emanating from primarily external organizational pressures or internal resource-driven change efforts, she highlights the need to re-engage with the professions raison d’être as a critical mechanism to address inequality within and beyond professional organizations. In particular, in addition to considering professional organizations as serving elite clients—and thereby unavoidably enhancing inequality—Harrison highlights the professions’ obligation to serve the common good as part of their social contract. In her essay, she argues for the need to account for and explore the role of the fiduciary model in facilitating normative change, and how fiduciary professionals relate to internal and external organizational practices (cf. Amis et al., 2021 ). This suggests developing a strong normative base for both scholars and teachers of professional organizations who must use university curricula to enhance students’ historical awareness of the professions’ ancient social contract and of their role-related expectations to serve the common good. Importantly, such a normative base may also inform broader debates on the meaning and award of ‘merit’ in PSFs (cf. Friedman), in teaching, research but also amongst powerful decision-makers.

Inequality is one of the grand challenges of our times. Our aims in this forum were twofold: to investigate the relationship between inequality and professions and professional organizations in different contexts and from different theoretical perspectives; and to critically examine the role of professionals and professional organizations in enabling meaningful solutions to the challenges posed by inequality. Our contributors showed that professions’ research has much to offer in developing a scholarly understanding of inequality while the opportunities for future research and policy development are manifold—ranging from broadening our theoretical toolkits and geographical scope to re-engaging with core debates around the meaning and purpose of professions. However, our forum has also exposed considerable doubt and uncertainty regarding the potential of professional organizations to generate meaningful solutions that address the profound inequalities characterizing the field. Sam Friedman argued that professions continue to be ‘restricted by a narrow focus on equality’. Louise Ashley emphasized the limited evidence of social mobility programs in improving the careers and working lives of under-represented groups. Mehdi Boussebaa proposed that it was unlikely that (G)PSFs offer meaningful solutions as doing so would bring about their own demise, while Brooke Harrington connects this issue back to the declining attention to professional ethics and the lack of sanctions for unethical behaviour. Developing new research agendas is clearly a way forward in addressing some of these challenges, yet the persistence of inequality also asks us, as scholars and educators to take an active role. Moving ahead, we need to design curricula that build on the earlier era of professionalism and engage in teaching practices that encourage students to question dominant capitalist views in relation to the implications for inequality. Another important area is our interaction with practitioners where we could become more active advocates for change and create fora for collaborative action across professions. We hope that this paper will give inspiration to scholars interested in the theorizing of inequality and offer new impetus for actively addressing inequality as a grand challenge within the professions and beyond.

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For example, Goldthorpe (2016 ) has calculated that the chances of men in the UK whose parents did professional or managerial jobs ending up in professional or managerial jobs themselves rather than in working-class routine and semi-routine jobs have remained, over the last 60 years, around six times greater than the chances of men born in the working class ending up in professional or managerial jobs rather than the working class.

Strictly speaking, Poland is, of course, not part of the Global South, but this example nevertheless serves well as an illustration of the inequalities being discussed here.

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Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms

Berufe und soziale Ungleichheit. Theoretische Perspektiven und Mechanismen

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• Berufe – Theorien und Messkonzepte
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• Published: 24 July 2020
• Volume 72 , pages 19–40, ( 2020 )

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• Andreas Haupt 1 &
• Christian Ebner 2  

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People’s occupations are strongly related to multiple dimensions of inequality, such as inequalities in wages, health, autonomy, or risk of temporary employment. The theories and mechanisms linking occupations to these inequalities are subject to debate. We review the recent evidence on the relationship between occupations and inequality and discuss the following four overarching theoretical perspectives: occupations and skills, occupations and tasks, occupations and institutions, and occupations and culture. We show that each perspective has strong implications for how scholars conceptualize occupations and which occupational characteristics are seen as relevant when explaining inequalities. Building on this, we review and critically examine the relevant theories related to and the mechanisms of the relationship between occupation and wage inequality, as an example. We conclude that there is sound empirical knowledge available on the relationships between occupations and inequality; however, some of the mechanisms are still unclear.

Zusammenfassung

Berufe hängen mit verschiedensten Facetten sozialer Ungleichheit zusammen, darunter sind Lohnungleichheit, Gesundheit, Autonomie oder Risiken befristeter Beschäftigung. Theorien und Mechanismen, die Berufe mit diesen Ungleichheiten verbinden, werden teils kontrovers diskutiert. Wir betrachten neuere Erkenntnisse zum Verhältnis von Berufen und sozialer Ungleichheit und nehmen eine Einordnung in vier übergreifende theoretische Perspektiven vor: Berufe und Fähigkeiten, Berufe und Tätigkeiten, Berufe und Institutionen sowie Berufe und Kultur. Wir zeigen, dass Wissenschaftler Berufe je nach Perspektive unterschiedlich konzeptualisieren und jeweils andere Berufsmerkmale für die Erklärung von Ungleichheiten als relevant erachten. Darauf aufbauend veranschaulichen wir anhand des Beispiels der Lohnungleichheiten berufsspezifische Theorien und Mechanismen entlang der vier beschriebenen Perspektiven. Wir kommen zu dem Schluss, dass es fundiertes empirisches Wissen über die Zusammenhänge zwischen Berufen und sozialer Ungleichheit gibt, die Mechanismen jedoch an mehreren Stellen immer noch unklar sind.

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1 Introduction

Occupation is a key concept in the social sciences. Its use in explaining the forms and levels of inequality spans over more than a millennium, starting with the early works of Weber, Durkheim, and Marx and continuing to the recent debates about the relationships between occupations and various dimensions of inequality (Avent-Holt et al. 2019 ; Oesch and Piccitto 2019 ). Despite some claims regarding a perceived marginalization of occupation in understanding life chances and positions within societies in the past decades (Kim et al. 2018 ; Beck et al. 1992 ), occupations and their characteristics persisted as the basis for explaining very diverse dimensions of inequality. Occupations are the basis for various forms of economic inequality (Reichelt and Abraham 2017 ; Nawakitphaitoon and Ormiston 2015 ). They also strongly contribute to non-economic kinds of inequality. Depending on the occupation, the school-to-work transition quality differs (DiPrete et al. 2017 ). Different occupations are associated with upward and downward mobility in the labor market (Menze 2017 ; Mayer et al. 2010 ). The risk of temporary employment is distributed unevenly across different occupations (Stuth 2017 ), as are levels of stress (Johnson et al. 2005 ), opportunities to participate in continuing vocational training (Ehlert 2017 ), or short sleep duration risks (Shockey and Wheaton 2017 ).

In comparison to its frequent use in empirical analyses, there is little discussion about the theoretical questions concerning the perspectives of occupation and the theoretical grounds of the relationship between occupation and inequality. The literature provides various, sometimes conflicting, definitions of occupation, which leads to uncertainties about the use of the concept or to fuzziness in its use (Dostal 2002 ). Furthermore, in some studies, occupation appears as a predictive variable, but the causal link between occupation or the characteristics of different occupations and the inequality dimension under study remains unclear (Card et al. 2013 ). In such a case, occupation serves as a placeholder for complex social processes, which link the occupational structure to dimensions of inequality.

We believe that the theoretical argument regarding the relationship between occupations and inequality would profit by first examining the theoretical perspectives on occupations. Here, we argue that at least four perspectives need to be distinguished. First, we discuss an individual perspective, which focusses on occupation-specific sets of skills Footnote 1 . Second, we examine occupations, tasks, and jobs , which is a perspective focusing on demand-side characteristics but not employees. Third, we shed light on an institutional perspective on occupation. Finally, we discuss the relationship between culture and occupation . Our claim is that we need to be aware of all the perspectives to understand the full extent of the possible relationships between occupation and the various dimensions of inequality.

For the purpose of this paper, we treat these perspectives as analytically independent, but we are aware of proposals integrating at least two of them (Damelang et al. 2019 ; Anteby et al. 2016 ). Furthermore, we value the research perspectives connecting occupations with industries or organizations (Janietz and Bol 2020 ; Auspurg et al. 2017 ). Within this article, we focus on occupation alone, which abstracts from these connections.

We also stress that we do not discuss overarching labor-market theories here. Occupation-specific markets are just one building block within the labor market. They exist in parallel to firm-specific and unspecific labor markets, which can have different logics and mechanisms (Sengenberger 1987 ). Here, our aim is to focus exclusively on occupation and its relationship to inequality.

In the next step, we spell out four perspectives on that relationship. Each one focuses on very different occupational characteristics, which serve as the starting point for the mechanisms generating occupation-specific inequality. It is far beyond the scope of this paper to offer a comprehensive list of them. Our aim is to review and clarify how scholars (can possibly) argue if they want to make a case that occupation relates to inequality.

2 Four Perspectives on Occupations

Occupations are social constructs . Societies can create or eliminate occupations within the framework of training courses and courses of study. They can implement them in laws and file them in official classifications. Associations and companies can advertise occupations. In addition, occupations are also parts of concepts, attitudes, and stereotypes.

Occupations thus represent an objective reality, even if they do not exist without people. Their existence has a formative effect on society and people. With occupations, societies structure the acquisition of individual skills within the framework of education systems. Occupations enable organizations to structure work activities along specified work tasks. Institutions regulate access into occupations, occupational behavior, and outcomes. Occupations serve as orientations for (potential) employers and employees about necessary skills, the work environment, and people can adapt their identities to occupational cultures. All these characteristics can result in occupation-specific inequalities. The underlying mechanisms or the conditions of these mechanisms may vary between countries, regions, and over time, adding further complexity.

2.1 Occupations and Skills

Scholars using a perspective on occupations and skills focus on the occupational specifics of the labor market supply . By using such a perspective, scholars typically abstract from demand-side characteristics such as recruitment into jobs or organizations, the distribution of vacancies, or discrimination. Instead, they focus on the acquisition, formation, heterogeneity, and prices of skills, capabilities, and competencies.

Human capital theory, which gained great popularity owing to Mincer ( 1974 ) and Becker ( 1964 ), is one prominent example of reasoning using such a perspective. In the early stages, human capital theory did not explicitly account for occupational skills but used schooling and on-the-job experience as the measure of skill. Becker’s ( 1964 ) notion of specific skills (as opposed to general skills) has usually been referred to as firm-specific and not occupation-specific skills. We also include Bourdieu’s capital theory as an example of this perspective. He claimed that skills take the form of embodied cultural capital, which persons transfer into other kinds of capital, such as economic or social capital (Bourdieu 1986 ). His theory did not include occupation-specific capital either, but paved the way for studies that did.

In particular, human capital theory came under attack for using broad educational categories and experience as skill measures, as well as for abstracting the formation of skill-sets owing to occupations (Blaug 1976 ). Scholars claimed that theories abstracting from occupational heterogeneity were not sufficient to describe the relevant differences between individuals to understand the dimensions of inequality (Kambourov and Manovskii 2009 ; England 1982 ). Thus, social scientists enriched the theories focusing on individual skills referring to occupations.

Such enriched theories needed to define the term occupation. A prominent example defines occupations as “complex, institutionalized bundles of the market-relevant working abilities of persons” (Beck et al. 1980 , p. 19; own translation). The emphasis here is the institutionalization of the “bundles” or skill sets. Such a definition has strong implications. First, currently unemployed individuals can have an occupation. For example, people can be “electrical engineers” even if they are not currently employed. Second, it is not important what an individual actually does, only what they are able to do. Third, occupational borders run along skill-sets but not any other characteristics. Fourth, untypical, non-institutionalized skill-sets may exist, but they do not constitute an occupation.

The core assumption of an occupational perspective on skills is that occupations form skill-sets. The theories using such a perspective assume that skills are not atomistic in the sense that individuals supply one particular skill or supply parts of their skills to different firms, which is an explicit assumption in Human Capital Theory. Individuals supply and employers demand typical sets of skills , enabling employees to solve a typical set of problems within the context of paid labor. Thus, both sides have an interest in forming and expressing the expectations of skill-sets to increase the efficiency of matching between the supplied and demanded skills.

The types of skills or skill-sets scholars need to distinguish for meaningful modeling is a matter of debate. Databases such as the O*Net offer very detailed skill-sets for occupations, but for most empirical analyses, scholars need to categorize skills. Some propose a distinction between cognitive, creative, technical or social skills, whereas others include managerial skills, noncognitive skills, or collapse categories (Cobb-Clark and Tan 2011 ; Liu and Grusky 2013 ). The scholarly work based on these typologies claims that the differences in the occupational compositions of these skill types are important for various dimensions of inequality. We discuss such theories in Sect. 3.1.

2.2 Occupations, Tasks, and Jobs

A second perspective centers on the demand side , focusing on an occupation’s relationship to tasks and jobs. For this perspective, two aspects are essential. The first involves the demand-side structures around jobs, which are not endlessly separable. Thus, if an employee fills a job, other candidates with equal skills cannot sell their skills regarding that job. Second, it is important what people (are supposed to) do at work. What people do is contingent on the workplace characteristics and can be largely independent of the skill-set of employees.

A core assumption of this perspective is that employers have typical problem sets within their organizations that are associated with a set of tasks that should solve these problems. Following Acemoglu and Autor ( 2011 , p. 1045), a task “… is a unit of work activity that produces output (goods and services).” A single combination of problems and/or tasks within an organization is a  job . The International Labour Organization (ILO) thus defines a job as “a set of tasks and duties performed, or meant to be performed, by one person, including for an employer or in self-employment” (International Labour Office 2012 , p. 11).

A corresponding demand-side-oriented definition of occupation captures occupation as a “set of jobs whose main tasks and duties are characterized by a high degree of similarity” (International Labour Office 2012 , p. 11). First, it follows that scholars or practitioners need to define the degree of task similarity constituting an occupation. In doing so, they need to decide how fine-grained the comparison should be. The more specific the task descriptions are, the more detailed and numerous are the resulting occupations. Second, the job characteristics but not skills of employees distinguish occupations. Thus, individuals without a job do not have an occupation according to this definition.

Influential theoretical approaches using this perspective are the job-competition theory (Thurow 1975 ), the vacancy-competition theory (Sørensen 1977 ), and the theory of task-biased technological change (Acemoglu and Autor 2011 ). Early work discussed the consequences of including the existence of jobs, job hierarchies, and vacancies for labor-market outcomes. These theories did not focus much on the role of occupations. More recent theories ask whether broad task types have characteristics connecting them to inequality. These approaches are not necessarily occupation-specific either. Many abstract task types form underlying occupations.

There is, however, very good reason to focus on the relationship between occupations, tasks, and jobs. Jobs (as specific sets of tasks) are typically not unique, because the problems associated with the job are typically not specific to a single workplace within a single organization. Most jobs are the result of functional differentiations of organizations or societies. The prerequisite for a successful division of labor is an efficient coordination of activities and jobs that meet the typical demand for skills within a society. Occupation-specific jobs enable organizations to do this by bundling tasks and jobs efficiently and meaningfully at a higher level of aggregation (Abraham et al. 2018 ). Thus, the requirements for performing tasks successfully and without large training costs can be very occupation-specific (Gibbons and Waldman 2004 ). Eventually, the analytical separation of tasks from occupations might not always be feasible (Gathmann and Schönberg 2010 ).

Even though scholars acknowledge occupation-specific tasks, how to distinguish task characteristics properly is an open debate. An influential typology of tasks is to distinguish between four types by crossing routine/nonroutine and analytical/manual tasks (Autor et al. 2003 , p. 1286). Examples of routine analytical tasks are record-keeping, calculation, or reviewing forms. Educating others, giving a medical diagnosis, or lobbying are nonroutine analytical tasks. Manual routine tasks are sorting, picking, or rule-based construction. Manual nonroutine tasks include hair cutting, geriatric care, or janitorial services. The newer taxonomy of Dengler et al. ( 2014 ) distinguishes analytical nonroutine tasks, interactive nonroutine tasks, cognitive routine tasks, and manual routine/nonroutine tasks.

In Sect. 3.2, we discuss the mechanisms relating occupations, jobs, and tasks to wage inequality.

2.3 Occupations and Institutions

The third perspective highlights the relationship between occupations and institutions (Damelang et al. 2019 ). Scholars using this perspective study specific sets of norms about skills, competencies, behaviors, or, more broadly, the institutional linkages of occupations into social spheres, such as the educational system or the labor market. This perspective captures occupational characteristics from the meso- or macrostructural level, which shape both the skill and the task dimensions of occupations.

Theories using this perspective claim that we need to take the embeddedness of occupations in institutions into account to understand the relationship between occupation and inequality for two reasons. First, institutions solve a fundamental trust problem in recruitment. Second, occupations differ regarding the distribution of resources in ways that we are not able to explain with differences in tasks and skills alone.

The first point challenges the assumption that employers observe the skills (and productivity) of candidates with educational investment and experience clearly. Recruiters face a huge amount of uncertainty by judging the most productive/skilled candidate based on certificates. Certificates are, in the sense of Bourdieu ( 1986 ), institutionalized cultural capital. However, recruiters can rely on the information given by certificates only if they trust that the candidates truly acquired a standardized set of skills, which they associate with the certificate. Only then can recruiters be certain about the competencies of workers to perform the required tasks. However, these certificates can be more or less trustworthy, depending on the grade of institutionalization of occupational training. Recent works show that the level of trustworthiness of occupational degrees is important for recruitment decisions (Columbaro and Monaghan 2009 , Stumpf et al. in this volume).

The second point focuses on occupational inequalities that are not based on skill and task differentials. For example, in The System of Professions, Andrew Abbott ( 1988 ) analyzes how and why occupational groups control knowledge to gain advantages in terms of power, status, and economic resources. He argues that we cannot understand such differences without analyzing how occupations create, shape, and reinforce institutions, such as boards, chambers, associations, or curricula for vocational education. The distinction between a powerful profession and other kinds of occupations is not based on skill or task characteristics alone but also on the relationship between occupations and such institutions.

In light of this, scholars analyzed how occupations created or shaped occupation-specific labor market institutions, such as boards and occupational associations, and what they do (see Giesecke et al. in this volume). Boards administer the self-organization of an occupation (Pagliero 2019 ). Typically, boards issue licenses, create codes of conduct, report misbehaviors, are responsible for examinations, and counsel the government in occupational affairs. An occupational board is the most powerful tool for an occupation as a collective actor to influence the norms, laws, and the market and to build up the occupation as a profession. Occupational associations are, in contrast, clubs for people with an interest in promoting or developing an occupation. A third form of an occupational institution is the occupational union. Typically, unions work on the industry level, but in some cases, occupations found unions to engage in wage bargaining and strikes (Dütsch et al. 2014 ). In contrast, boards are typically not permitted to engage in strikes.

Theories on social closure expand this perspective beyond the profession/nonprofession distinction and ask which institutionalized rules gain occupations privileged access to resources (Weeden 2002 ). These rules can be formal or informal. For example, governments can issue formal rules about recruitment through licensing laws. They define which employees are allowed to perform occupational tasks legally (Haupt 2016 a). There is no legal ground in Germany that restricts employees from working as data scientists. However, Germans are not allowed to perform heart surgery without a license or to perform the work of physicians—even if these tasks would be performed in private and without pay. A second kind of occupational closure is based on informal recruitment rules (Rohrbach-Schmidt, in this volume; Bürmann in this volume). In many cases, recruiters are not obliged to select candidates with particular certificates. However, they do so anyway, leading to the exclusion of equally suited candidates in some instances. Some occupations show a third form of closure, i.e., regulating entry into self-employment (Haupt 2016 b). Many governments apply rules for the commerce of weapons and drugs, or services for physicians and advocates. In addition, some countries regulate the self-employment of crafts (Rostam-Afschar 2014 ; Damelang et al. 2017 ).

The aforementioned norms target entry into occupations. Some occupations face additional rules for the prices of their services (Rostam-Afschar and Strohmaier 2019 ; Haupt 2016 a). Moreover, some occupations are subject to minimum wage laws—either by defining special minimum wages or by exempting them (Skedinger 2006 ; Schiller 1994 ).

Our discussion makes it clear that occupations are related to a country’s institutional structure in many ways. We discuss inequality-generating mechanisms with these occupational characteristics as starting points in Sect. 3.3.

2.4 Occupations and Culture

The fourth perspective relates to occupations and culture . Within this perspective, we distinguish two lines of reasoning. First, scholars place occupations in a societies’ culture, with its shared attitudes, knowledge, and stereotypes. Second, occupations can form a specific culture, which scholars can analyze and use for explanations of inequality.

The occupational knowledge is deeply rooted among the members of a society. In her work Theory of Circumscription and Compromise , Linda Gottfredson ( 1981 ) claims that people often share similar images of occupations within a culture (occupational stereotypes). For example, there are ideas about what certain respected occupations are like, the degree to which occupations are “male” or “female”, and what the typical fields of activity are for job holders. Such occupational images are already consolidated in the course of primary socialization via family, friends, educational institutions, or the mass media. In addition, collective actors, such as employers’ associations or trade unions, try to convey certain job descriptions to the population and make occupations visible. Individuals particularly strive for certain occupations when their occupational images agree with their self-concept, i.e., how they view themselves, privately and publicly. Such cultural concepts lead to the group-specific selection of and employment duration within occupations.

People shape and consolidate specific occupational cultures. In line with Weeden and Grusky ( 2005 ), we describe a three-step process leading to occupation-specific identities, attitudes, perceptions, or preferences but also to occupation-specific segregation. These three steps are as follows:

1) Self-selection. Individuals have certain occupational stereotypes in mind. Mirroring these stereotypes with their own self-concept, attitudes, abilities, and value orientations, individuals strive for occupations that fit their aspirations particularly well.

2) Gatekeeper selection. The gatekeepers within a network are more prone to granting access to persons who have adequate attitudes and values (Petersen et al. 2000 ).

3) Socialization. Training in an occupation, facing similar working conditions, as well as social interactions with the incumbents of occupations, reinforces existing attitudes, values, and practices. Practitioners of an occupation do not only share attitudes, value orientations, and practices, they can also form an identity specific to the occupation. In summary, these processes can result in occupation-specific cultures that are able to influence life chances, political participation, and lifestyles.

Some scholars conclude from this that occupations as microclasses serve as better grounds for analysis than traditional big classes (Weeden and Grusky 2005 ; Jonsson et al. 2009 ). Such microclasses “emerge around functional niches in the division of labor” (Weeden and Grusky 2005 , p. 142) and represent comparatively homogeneous groupings of employed persons, which may reflect the reality of life in postmodern societies better than established large-scale class concepts (for more information on occupational status scales and class schemes, see Bernhard et al. in this volume).

In Sect. 3.4, we discuss the mechanisms relating occupations and culture to wage inequality.

3 Occupations and Wage Inequality

The four perspectives above can be very useful for explanations of inequality. Here, we discuss their application for explaining occupation-specific wage inequality. The distribution of wages is by far the best-studied phenomenon in inequality research, offering multiparadigmatic and sometimes conflicting theoretical approaches. A broad stream of literature shows the close link between occupations and wage inequality for a wide range of countries (Mouw and Kalleberg 2010 ; Williams 2013 ; Card et al. 2013 ; Kampelmann and Rycx 2012 ). However, the mechanisms generating occupation-specific wage inequality are still subject to debate. We review the prominent research on occupation-specific approaches to wage inequality to reflect state-of-art theories. It is our aim to show opportunities for theoretical reasoning regarding these mechanisms from different perspectives. Furthermore, we reflect the need for further theory building. Table  1 provides an overview of the perspectives, selected theories and associated mechanisms.

3.1 Occupations, Skills, and Wages

Human Capital Theory assumes that productivity is observable and that pay is a direct consequence of productivity. Such a direct link between skills, productivity, and wages is not always theoretically feasible but can be a good (first) approximation for studying the role of occupations in the relationship between skills and the distribution of wages (Beyer and Knight 1989 ).

As we pointed out above (Sect. 2.1), individuals do not supply one particular skill, but typical skill-sets, which are more or less specific to different occupations. Some occupational skills can be more investment intensive. The wages paid for them are higher than those of other skills if employers expect an undersupply owing to a lack of compensation for a higher individual investment. Thus, the price for the wage does not only reflect productivity but also the (expected) scarcity of skills.

Furthermore, the acquisition of particular occupational skills can need higher amounts of talent or of general skills, such as intelligence, stress resistance, or language skills, than others (Ghatak et al. 2007 ). Employers can prefer workers with such skills and pay them higher wages. This results in occupation-specific wage differentials.

Human Capital Theory also assumes that employees can separate their skills infinitely and sell them to different employers. This very strong assumption does not reflect the labor market mechanics well. Skills are embodied in people and people cannot separate themselves infinitely. Thus, they need to provide their skills to a small number of employers, but typically only to one. In some cases, employers do not need (or buy) all the skills of the employee’s occupational skill-set, resulting in a poor match between the employee’s skills and the employer’s demands, reducing their productivity. Thus, these employees receive wage disadvantages compared with employees with better skill matches. Recent work focussing on the matching process and its consequences show such a pattern empirically (Nordin et al. 2010 ; Rohrbach-Schmidt and Tiemann 2011 ; Bol et al. 2019 ).

Finally, changes in the demand for occupation-specific skills alter their prices and, consequently, occupational wages. The theory of skill-biased technological change (SBTC) argues that shifts in production based on computerization increased the demand for and return to high-skilled employees and, thus favors occupations with cognitive skills (Berman et al. 1998 ). In light of this, Liu and Grusky ( 2013 ) explain increases in between-occupational wage inequality in the USA between 1970 and 2010, with changed returns for cognitive, creative, technical, and social skills. Analytical skills, as a subdomain of cognitive skills, showed the steepest increase in returns. However, Beaudry et al. ( 2016 ) demonstrate a “great reversal” of the returns for cognitive skills after the tech bust in 2000, which was reinforced by the 2008 financial crisis. This is not in line with a simple SBTC theory.

The literature offers several other pieces of conflicting evidence for SBTC, leading to the impression that this theory is too simple (Hutter and Weber 2017 ; Card and DiNardo 2002 ; Acemoglu and Autor 2011 ). On a theoretical level, it is still far from clear in what way skill-related demand shifts influence occupations and occupational wage inequality. Does it matter that an occupation only includes a type of skill, such as analytical thinking, or must it be the main skill? Furthermore, general concepts such as “cognitive skills” can refer to very heterogeneous abilities for specific occupations. For a physician, it typically means diagnosing, for an investment banker, analyzing economic opportunities. Currently, these theories assume that an average return for the type of skill across occupations is informative about a general, underlying process. We do not know whether that is correct. This may be true for some occupations (managers, bankers), which can strongly influence the overall picture, but for others, this type of skill may not influence wages in the same manner.

3.2 Occupations, Tasks, Jobs, and Wages

Mechanisms relying on skill differentials typically abstract from jobs and their characteristics, as well as their relationship with occupations. Within this section, we discuss theories that place job and task characteristics at the center of the analysis.

Firms and organizations typically form their labor demands on the grounds of occupation-specific task sets, leading to occupation-specific job pools within the firms (Sørensen and Kalleberg 1977 ). Such pools can have three consequences.

First, firms attribute specific tasks to occupations. Firms typically do not split task bundles but assign them as bundles to occupations. If some tasks within these bundles are more rewarding, the occupations’ exclusive (or stronger) relation to these tasks leads to higher occupational wages. Rohrbach-Schmidt ( 2019 ) offers evidence for this mechanism but also highlights the relevance of task variability within occupations for between-worker inequality.

Second, occupations sort across firms and organizations in particular ways. Furthermore, firms and organizations can have very different product–market power levels, resulting in higher revenues—independent of the workers’ productivity (Sørensen 1996 ). If firms share such rents and occupations sort differently over firms with more/less product market power, then occupations are able to profit from rent-sharing differently, which explains some of the between-occupation inequality (Card et al. 2014 ).

Third, firms can decide to outsource or out-contract specific tasks of whole job pools. If tasks or jobs have a strong link to particular occupations, some occupations are more affected by out-contracting and outsourcing. Both lead to a decline in the employees’ power in wage bargaining (Goldschmidt and Schmieder 2017 ). Thus, occupation-specific wage inequality can be based on the changing power relations due to employment dualization, but studies analyzing this mechanism are very scarce (Ochsenfeld 2018 ).

The previous reasoning focused on the structural characteristics of jobs and tasks from a cross-sectional perspective. Such a perspective does not analyze the changes in task demands. However, a large discussion in the wake of the Task-Biased Technological Change (TBTC) Theory focused on such changes and how they influenced wage inequality. At its core, the theory claims that technological changes increased the replaceability of some tasks and enhanced the demand for others. Thus, the occupations associated with these tasks suffered or profited in specific ways. The main prediction of TBTC is that the middle of the occupational wage structure hollowed out because these occupations have a strong connection to routine tasks, which could either be replaced by computers or performed cheaper offshore. Instead, the demand for low-skilled, not offshorable service tasks, as well as high-skilled cognitive nonroutine tasks increased, leading to a polarization of the employment and wage structure (Spitz-Oener 2006 ; Acemoglu and Autor 2011 ).

Fortin and Lemieux ( 2016 ) strongly connect the changes of wages within and between occupations in the USA to the changed demand for tasks. However, the support for this hypothesis outside the USA is very limited (Antonczyk et al. 2009 ; Oesch and Menes 2011 ; Goos and Manning 2007 ) and Oesch and Piccitto ( 2019 ) even claim it to be a myth for European countries. The empirical picture relating occupations, different tasks, and wages is very mixed. Some find no to weak relations between tasks and (occupational) wages (Antonczyk et al. 2009 ; Salvatori 2018 ; Fernández-Macías and Hurley 2016 ). Some studies find substantial wage effects of task offshoring on occupational wages (Baumgarten et al. 2013 ; Goos et al. 2014 ), whereas others, such as Reichelt et al. (in this volume) show no results on overall wage inequality. The same mixed picture is offered by the literature on the relation of occupations, automation, and wages (Autor 2015 ). Automation replaced labor in some occupations but seems to have increased it in others (Atkinson and Wu 2017 ). Autor and Dorn ( 2013 ) report a strong increase in low-skilled service jobs in the USA owing to technological change, but Oesch ( 2013 ) does not find such patterns for European societies.

The relation between task changes and wage inequality is thus a very complex one, plausibly incorporating many overlaying mechanisms. The mixed picture may be a result of such overlaying processes. Technological change and offshorability are not the only two factors influencing the distribution of tasks within a society. Within the past decades, Western societies witnessed an upswing in the demand for elderly care, education, legal services, and health care (Witte and Haupt 2019 ; Santiago 2002 ; Michelson 2013 ; Dwyer 2013 ). Some of these changes are the results of population change, while others, such as the increase in pre-school education in Germany, result from changing norms within a society (see Grgic in this volume). It is not clear how TBTC relates to such processes and how the combination of these influences shapes the occupational composition and wage structure of societies.

Furthermore, technological change targets only some tasks associated with occupations, but rarely all of them (Dengler and Matthes 2018 ). Thus, occupations can adapt to the challenges from the substitution potentials of their associated tasks. For some occupations, technological change or offshorability may even increase the productivity for those occupations (see Reichelt et al. in this volume). In addition, the processes associated with task changes can lead to the creation of new occupations. Our knowledge about these processes is very sparse and subject to future work.

3.3 Occupations, Institutions, and Wages

Employees have a strong interest in signaling their productivity with certificates and firms use them as major sources to screen a candidate’s capabilities (Stiglitz 1975 ). Moreover, firms are interested in reducing the risk of unproductive employees (often referred to as lemons in line with Akerlof ( 1970 )). As we discussed in Sect. 2.3, the screening of an employee’s capabilities on the grounds of occupational certificates is only feasible if employers trust the information given by the institutions issuing certification. However, trust in an occupational certificate is not an easily established concept. It is based strongly on formal institutionalization, which is a process of setting and enforcing rules about occupational training and certification by authorities (Albert 2016 ). For example, German vocational education curricula and occupational certificates are the result of formalized application and negotiation processes between all interest groups involved and explicitly include employer representatives, who are concerned with a high degree of fit between the job descriptions and the requirement profiles of the companies’ jobs. This is a highly formal and institutionalized way of securing trust in the information given by occupational certificates. If employers do not trust or have doubts about the information given by certificates, candidates have lower labor-market success (Tholen 2019 ).

The theories of credentialism and social closure (Brown 2001 ; Murphy 1988 ) explore the (un)intended consequence of excluding alternative candidates based on the strong emphasis on certificates. Recruitment processes focusing on (trustworthy) occupational certificates limit the supply of candidates able to fill these positions (Weeden 2002 ). The literature offers at least three different processes that can lead to the exclusion of candidates.

First, organizations or firms form strong informal rules for occupation-specific recruitment. We can expect such rules in markets with a steady supply of candidates with occupational skill sets certified by trustworthy institutions. In such cases, recruiters rely strongly on this signal and have a tendency to exclude others (Behrenz 2001 ; Bangerter et al. 2012 ). Their main reason for the exclusion is the reduction of training costs for candidates with a lesser skill match (Bills et al. 2017 ). A consequence of such recruitment is the formation of closed occupation-specific labor markets, with high barriers to entry—even if it is an unintended consequence of a firm’s recruitment behavior (Haupt 2012 ). We know very well that the more closed an occupational labor market is, the higher are the average wages of the employees inside this market (Weeden 2002 ; Haupt 2012 ; Bol and Drange 2017 ; Bol and Weeden 2015 ; van de Werfhorst 2011 ). It is, however, an open debate as to which mechanisms are responsible for this relationship. Most importantly, the literature needs to answer why employers should react to degrees of closure (or characteristics associated with it) with higher wages. The most common argument is that closure artificially reduces the supply of employees, thereby creating a labor supply shortage, which leads to higher wages for those who are able to enter the market. If that were the case, we should observe larger shares of vacancies or longer episodes of unfilled vacancies in more closed labor markets (Haupt 2012 ; Cardona 2013 ). However, the empirical evidence for both is lacking (Damelang et al. 2019 ). A further argument concerns the increased matching efficiency based on occupational closure. If an occupation supplies a very special skill set for a particular market segment in a trustworthy way, they are the most productive alternatives among all candidates and do not need the same amount of further training. Thus, employers compete for them with higher wages. The literature offers some evidence for this claim (Haupt 2012 ; Bol et al. 2019 ; Ehlert 2017 ).

Second, the literature offers broad evidence that employers tend to devaluate foreign certificates because they attribute lower signal strength regarding the expected occupational skills or find them to be less trustworthy (Damelang and Abraham 2016 ; Kreyenfeld and Konietzka 2002 ; Ebner and Helbling 2016 ). As a result, migrants work with lower probability in more rewarding closed occupational markets, have a higher risk of skill mismatch, and earn lower wages on average (see the articles by Rohrbach-Schmidt and Bürmann in this volume).

Third, countries can have legal rules for occupation-specific recruitment (licensing laws). Typically, the literature views licensing as the strongest form of occupational social closure (Koumenta et al. 2014 ). As for the case of general social closure, the literature offers broad evidence for the association of licensed occupations with higher wages (Weeden 2002 ; Pagliero 2011 ; Kleiner and Krueger 2013 ; Witte and Haupt 2019 ). There are, however, some studies showing conflicting evidence. Law and Marks ( 2013 ) compare the wages of registered and practical nurses between 1950 and 1970 in the USA. During this time, these occupations changed from certification to licensing in some states but remained certified in others. Using a difference-in-difference approach, the authors estimate no changes in wages attributable to this change in market regulation. The study by Redbird ( 2017 ) uses between-state variation of licensing over time to study the wage effects of licensing in the USA. Her estimates do not show a significant positive relationship between the licensing of an occupation and its mean wage trend. In addition to the conflicting empirical evidence, all theoretical problems of the connection between social closure and wages apply to licensing. The common claim regarding a labor supply shortage seems theoretically sound (if the market would be in equilibrium without licensing), but we do not have strong empirical evidence about artificial labor shortages based on licensing. It is plausible that other mechanisms, such as product market power, price setting, or network formation, work in favor of higher wages for licensed occupations, but our knowledge about them is very thin (see the discussion in Haupt 2020 ).

We know very little about the processes linking other occupational institutions, such as occupational associations or boards, to wage inequality (Pagliero 2019 ; Matthes and Vicari 2019 ). We do not know exactly how these institutions influence employee’s wages, and the empirical patterns for such a relationship are mixed (see Giesecke et al. in this volume).

3.4 Occupations, Culture, and Wages

The previous theories about the mechanisms between occupations and wages typically do not take the cultural context into account, which embeds occupations or the country’s labor market as a whole. However, we have strong evidence that culture is very important for hiring, careers, wage setting, or non-economic advantages (Bills et al. 2017 ; Rivera 2012 ; Hora 2020 ).

A variety of culturally induced processes of occupation-specific wages can be demonstrated by referring to the issue of occupational gender wage inequality. The research relying on gender theories of occupational selection and pay analyze the gender-specific attitudes and perceptions of the worth of labor (Busch 2013 ). Cultures define which occupations or occupational tasks are men’s and women’s work. People typically perceive men’s work as being more skill intensive and of higher economic worth than women’s work (Cohen and Huffman 2003 ; Charles and Grusky 2004 ; Hausmann et al. 2015 ). In light of this, wage offers are not only a result of productivity but also a product of the worth construction that is deeply rooted in the cultural perceptions of occupations, tasks, and gender. For example, Kricheli-Katz ( 2019 ) varies the information about the feminization of an occupation in a recruitment experiment and shows that recruiters believing to be in a female-dominated occupation devaluate the competencies of female candidates. This experiment complements other research findings correlating (changing) female shares within an occupation with lower wages, which is in line with predictions on devaluating women’s work (Leuze and Strauß 2016 ; England et al. 2007 ).

However, the relationship between gender, occupations, and wages is much more complex than devaluation. Adolescents have perceptions about occupation-specific stress or competition. Students with a careerist approach to higher education and the labor market are more prone to selecting majors with higher returns (Ochsenfeld 2014 ). The distributions of careerist attitudes, competition preferences, or the importance of money are gendered themselves, reflecting deeply embedded cultural socialization processes. They result in both occupational sex segregation and wage inequality between genders across occupations (Sinclair et al. 2019 ; Morgan et al. 2013 ).

Occupations can also form norms about typical working hours. In some occupations, it is acceptable to work part-time, while other occupations demand large amounts of overwork (Buchmann et al. 2010 ; Cha 2013 ). In combination with a culture attributing family-care work to women, family-friendly part-time occupations are attractive to women, but overwork-prone occupations are not. However, overwork pays off, because firms attribute higher levels of productivity and commitment to workers who work overtime (Weeden et al. 2016 ). The result is a reinforcement of gender–wage inequality (Cha and Weeden 2014 ). Goldin and Katz ( 2016 ) show that changing norms regarding overwork within pharmacies in the USA resulted in egalitarian gender shares and declining gender–wage inequality.

Social networks play a role in these processes too (England and Folbre 2005 ). Networks tend to develop on the basis of similar personal characteristics (social homophily). Gender-segregated networks strengthen existing views, roles and norms through processes of socialization. On the other hand, access to (well-paid) occupational positions takes place informally via networks.

Furthermore, occupations can form specific cultures influencing inequality. Traditional gender-dominated occupations can create gender-specific cultures, giving rise to discrimination . Automobile engineering, construction, or crafts show very masculine cultures in many societies, which lead to higher probabilities of conflict with other genders that may be viewed as “not employable” or “not fitting” into the occupation (Collinson 1988 ; Huppatz 2012 ). The crowding assumption holds that women are being discriminated against with regard to entering typical male occupations. This results in an oversupply of typical female occupations, which lowers the wages in these occupations.

The mechanisms discussed here also work with other categories apart from gender—any cultural shared stereotype related to occupations fit into these. We selected gender as a prominent example here, but stress that gender is, of course, only one out of many possible social categories.

4 Conclusion and Outlook

Within this article, we discussed four different perspectives on occupations: their skill set, their associated task set, their institutional characteristics, and their relation to culture. We believe that it is very useful to reflect on the perspective used within our own research to clarify the concept of occupation and to set a starting point for theoretical arguments. Possible misunderstandings between researchers may stem from the parallel use of different perspectives.

We do not claim the four perspectives to be the only ones. There may be others, e.g., from other theories, such as structural functionalism, other disciplines, such as theology, or from a practitioner’s perspective outside of academia. Our aim was to reflect the most frequently used perspectives in the social sciences, and we claim that these four are the most important. Further research may add to our list of perspectives to build up our cumulative knowledge of occupations and their relationships with inequality.

Given one perspective, we showed a typical reasoning about mechanisms linking occupations and inequality. We argued that occupations are not able to act themselves—even if some shortcut formulations in prominent articles suggest otherwise. Any theory about the relationship between occupations and dimensions of inequality must lay down how occupations or their characteristics influence the opportunities or mental states of people to open the black box.

We showed the fruitfulness of each perspective by applying mechanisms stemming from each one on wage inequality. The mechanisms linking occupational skills to wage inequality build on employee or candidate characteristics, their supply, and their prices. Each one can be influenced by occupations, as we showed above. The link between occupations, tasks, and wages is based on job characteristics. If firms or organizations change these job characteristics, occupations and occupational wages are affected accordingly. We further discussed the mechanisms linking the institutional characteristics of occupations to wage inequality. The reasoning about these mechanisms starts with the identification of institutionalized occupational characteristics and must then show how they affect the selection of the occupational training, recruitment, prices, and wages. That is not always the case in the literature and leaves much room for further research. The mechanisms linking occupations, culture, and wage inequality start with the place of occupations within a culture or the characteristics of the occupation-specific culture and then show how they alter beliefs, attitudes, or opportunities.

The research on occupations and inequality is complex, because occupations are part of almost any part of societal life. Our aim with this article was to both show this complexity and discuss how to handle it. It is our hope that further research can build upon the argumentation we proposed here. We have a good understanding of the relationships between occupations and inequality—but we can still dig deeper. Careful theory building along the discussed perspectives can be a very fruitful step toward this future.

We use occupation-specific skills, abilities, and competencies, as well as occupation-specific capital, interchangeably.

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Haupt, A., Ebner, C. Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms. Köln Z Soziol 72 (Suppl 1), 19–40 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11577-020-00685-0

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Introduction

Conflict and functionalism theories, challenge to social equality.

There is no question that inequality is prevalent in all sorts of human society. No matter the level of human development, inequality seems to be existent. It is even present in simple cultures where there is minimal variation in wealth.

Some individuals in such cultures may have privilege because of their prowess in certain skills such as hunting, medicine or access to ancestral power. In modern societies, inequality manifests in social and economic classes, power, income, access to health facilities, academic, gender and other forms. Social economical classes are the most common in most societies and have attracted attention from many sociologists. Many societies try to address the class issue but with little success.

Even socialist and communist governments that try to eliminate social economic classes fail to achieve equality. In Canada today, inequality is evident in various forms. Social economic classes, income variation, health, academic, ethnic, gender and other forms of inequality are obvious in the country. In the essay, I will join other sociologists in trying to address the persistent question “why inequality exist?”

Inequality, also referred to as social stratification, has been a core subject to sociologists for many years (Macionis and Linda 2010). Sociologists try to understand, explain and prescribe solutions to the issue of inequality. Despite of major sociologists such as Max Weber, Karl Marx and others trying to prescribe solution to inequality, the issue continues to persist. Marx was critical of capitalism and accused it of existence of social classes.

On the other hand, Weber agreed with Marx that economic interests led to social classes but viewed social stratification in terms of class, prestige and power. There are mainly two schools of thought to the issue of inequality: conflict and functional theories. To understand why inequality exists, it is helpful to review the divergent positions presented by the two theories and try to come up with a reconciling position.

Conflict and functionalism theories are the main theories trying to provide answers to why inequality exists in the society. The two theories take fundamentally different approaches to explain the issue. Functionalism theory views inequality as unavoidable and important to the society while conflict theory considers inequality to result from conflict and coercion in the social system (Andersen and Taylor 2006).

To functionalism sociologists, society is a system of parts with each part having useful contribution to the system. According to the theory, society can be compared to human body where various parts such as lungs, hands, heart, and eyes contribute to functionality of the body as a whole.

The way the social system maintains itself is of more interest to functionalist sociologists than specific interactions between the different parts of the system. To functionalists, inequality is unavoidable and leads to some good to the society. The theory assumes that any pattern in social system has its good purposes. Considering occupations, functionalists justify inequality in rewards by asserting that the rewards reflect the importance of the different occupations to the system.

For instance, functionalists would explain the high rewards and respect given to some occupations such as doctors, scientists and judges as compared to other occupations such farming and garbage collections, by saying that the former occupations are more important to the society as a whole. In addition, they would claim that such occupations require much talent, effort and education. Therefore, the high reward is meant to encourage individuals to take the pain to occupy such important positions.

Conflict theory provides the other extreme explanation to inequality in society. Unlike functionalism theory, conflict theory compares society to war. Conflict theory sociologists consider the society to be held together by conflict and coercion among members of the society.

According to Ridney (2001), conflict theory likens society to battlefield where members compete for control of limited resources and power. Unlike functionalists that stratify the society to functional parts that cooperate for the good of the society, conflict theory views society as consisting of competing parts (Rigney 2001).

The theorists, led by Karl Marx, consider social classes to result from blocked opportunities rather than talent and effort. While functionalists justify unequal rewards for different occupations as a way to utilize important talents and abilities, conflict theorists consider stratification in the society to limit utilization of talents from lower class. To conflict theorists, stratification in the society does not have positive contribution to the society.

Conflict and functionality theories on inequality shed light into causes of social stratification but do not completely explain the situation. The society can be viewed both as functional parts and as competing parts. Doctors, lawyers, scientists, carpenters, farmers, garbage collectors, cooks and other occupations are important to the society.

As functionalists argue, some occupations such as medicine require more effort and many years of preparation. It is therefore reasonable to reward doctors, judges and other such occupations highly to motivate individuals to occupy them. It is also natural to give respect and honor to individuals with unique and important skills. For instance, if a country has a single neurosurgeon, the surgeon would be valued and respected without asking for it.

However, it should be appreciated that other occupations that are considered less important, such as farming, are vital to sustainability of a society. Functionalism therefore makes sense when the society is considered as a system without deep consideration of individual members of the system. For instance, the theory cannot provide a convincing explanation to why some individual strive for wealth and power, since amassing wealth and power is not always good for the society.

Conflict theory provides a more practical explanation to inequality. Competition is a central thing in the society. Individuals compete for scarce resource, recognition, power and prestige (Macionis 2001). Considering scenario of a school, students compete for attention from their teacher, to be included in their school’s base-ball team, to top their class academically, to win scholarship for high education and many other things.

At individual lever, a student chooses an occupation mostly not by its contribution to the society but by reward and prestige that would come with it. In business, an individual is mostly motivated by the power and prestige that go along with wealth rather than importance of their service to the society. Conflict theory can explain competition in school, business, politics, and other occupation and social stratification that result. Bottom-line to stratified society, in fact, is the human propensity to gain dominion over others.

Attaining social equality is a major objective for human right bodies across the globe. However, that objective is not easy to achieve considering various manifestation of inequality in the world. In Canada, despite of various steps taken to ensure equality in various forms, inequality persists.

Social equality implies all people in a society having equal status. At minimum social equality implies equal rights to all individual in a society. The state however is not easy to achieve mostly because of historic inequality that already exist. For instance, although Canadian constitution guarantees equal rights to quality health and education, there is evident inequality in health and education.

Individuals in upper social economic classes have resources to access high standard of health services and afford quality education for themselves and for their children. Limited interaction between individuals from different social class makes it hard to achieve equality.

Individuals in upper social class tend to relate more with individuals in the same social class while individuals in other social classes do the same. Therefore, there is little chance for an individual to cross over from on social class to another (Horowitz 1997). In addition, individuals in privileged social class have resources, power and influence to maintain the status quo of inequality.

Division of labor has high contribution to inequality. Different occupations attract varying rewards and therefore contribute to inequality. Occupations such as medicine, engineering and law tend to attract high rewards as compared to other occupations as gardening. Even in occupations requiring relatively equal years of training, rewards seem to vary (Loseke 1999).

For example, despite of going through almost equal years of training, a teacher is likely to earn less as compared to an engineer. In addition, division of labor leads to some occupations being considered superior to others therefore promoting social stratification.

Individuals from different social economic classes may understand inequality differently. A wealthy individual can consider social inequality proportional to creativity and effort that an individual exerts in his endeavors. The rich may consider their fortune to result from their hard work and consider poverty to result from laziness and lack of initiative. On the other hand, a poor person can view social stratification to result from social injustice.

In conclusion, there is no obvious answer to why inequality exists in society. Inequality continues to exist even in countries with high level of human development as Canada. Functionalism and conflict theories can however help understand social stratification. To functionalists, social stratification is not necessarily evil but serves an important function in the society. On the other hand, conflict theory explains inequality to result from competition in society.

Without regard to how inequality comes about, it is obvious that high level of inequality is dehumanizing and can lead to social evils such as crime. It is therefore important to minimize inequality as much as possible. To promote social equality, an enabling environment that exposes all individuals to equal opportunities is necessary.

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Rigney, Daniel. 2001. The Metaphorical Society: An Invitation to Social Theory . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

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1. IvyPanda . "Inequality in Society: Conflict and Functionalism Theories." December 27, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/inequality-in-society/.

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Occupational gender segregation, social stratification and pay differences

2012 study published in the journal Sociology on the relationship between occupational segregation by gender and the extent of gender inequality.

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by Carol Tan, The Journalist's Resource October 11, 2013

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The United Nations adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women more than 30 years ago, but discrimination continues to be a daily fact of life for women around the globe. In a 2013 report, the IMF estimated that women in OECD countries — a group of 34 developed nations — earn 16% less than their male counterparts. This plays out at all levels of society: Women physicians in the United States earn 16% less than their male counterparts, while female CEOs earn 42% less than men in similar positions. With the notable exception of Scandinavian countries, political participation is also skewed: For example, in the 2012 U.S. Congress, women held just 101 seats out of 535 total — just 19% — and that is a record high.

Why gains for women have been slow to materialize has been the subject of considerable research. A 2011 study from DePaul University looked at 57 societies around the world, measuring levels of sexist ideologies and looked for correlations with data from the U.N. Gender Equality Measure (GEM). The study found that overall, greater sexism in a society predicts decreases in gender equality over time. Another possible factor is the role of occupational segregation, where some jobs may be filled more by men or women, be it by choice, obligation, or exclusion. Understanding of this issue has been complicated by the difficulty of isolating the role of inequality in social segregation.

A 2012 study published in Sociology , “The Dimensions of Occupational Gender Segregation in Industrial Countries,” seeks to address this question. The researchers, Jennifer Jarman of Lakehead University and Robert M. Blackburn and Girts Racko of the University of Cambridge, analyze the relationship between gender inequality and occupational segregation by gender. Examining 30 industrial countries, the researchers analyze the interplay of differences in pay, social stratification and occupational segregation. The authors note that “for over a century, researchers have linked occupational feminization to disadvantaged outcomes in terms of pay, prestige, power and attractiveness of the occupation concerned, both for the women entering the occupation, and also for the occupation as a whole.”

The study’s findings include:

• While segregation is certainly related to discrimination against women, it is also the case that the “less they are in competition with men (higher overall segregation) the greater their attainment of senior positions” and the more likely they are to be in more desirable jobs with better social positioning.
• With the exception of Slovenia, men are better paid than women. However, “although men are consistently advantaged in pay, the study finds that the male advantage does not follow national differences in segregation, suggesting that inequality is not the driving factor of segregation.”
• In the countries studied, occupational segregation by gender was real and substantial: Men tend to be concentrated in what have come to be perceived as “male” occupations and women in “female” ones. The five countries with the highest level of occupational segregation were Finland, Demark, Sweden, Portugal and Poland. The five with the lowest segregation were Japan, the Netherlands, Greece, Ecuador and Romania.
• The degrees of occupational segregation and the gender gap in pay varies considerably by country: “Even the Scandinavian countries like Finland, Denmark and Sweden, known for egalitarianism and hence moderate pay inequality component, have exceptionally high degrees of overall segregation. In contrast, Japan, despite being thought of as one of the most egalitarian countries in social problems and income in the world, is the most unequal country among industrial nations in terms of gender and income.”
• Women tend to outperform men in the general desirability of occupations, as measured by the Cambridge Social Interaction and Stratification Scale (CAMSIS). “[Such] occupations do not merely provide economic rewards, but also are highly significant in the structuring of social space and can create or obstruct pathways to social networks and opportunities.”
• Occupational segregation and the gender gap in pay were found to be inversely related to a certain degree: “The position of women is more favorable where the overall segregation is higher — the lower the male advantage on pay and the greater the female advantage on stratification.”

Overall, the findings suggest that occupational segregation is not a clear-cut measure or indicator of gender inequality. Instead, it can have positive effects for women, particularly in terms of social positioning. “Men remain on the top in terms of pay, but women, when taken as a whole group in comparison to men as a whole group, are on the top in terms of stratification with all of the ensuing social ramifications that such a shift in social space entails. This means that women’s occupations are healthier, permit greater access to higher status networks, and involve working with better educated people than men’s occupations.”

Keywords: Gender gap, Gini coefficient, women and work

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Women workers, particularly women of color, experience multiple types of inequality in the labor force, including gender and racial wage gaps, occupational segregation, and a disproportionate burden of costs associated with caregiving.

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Occupations and Inequality: Theoretical Perspectives and Mechanisms

People’s occupations are strongly related to multiple dimensions of inequality, such as inequalities in wages, health, autonomy, or risk of temporary employment. The theories and mechanisms linking occupations to these inequalities are subject to debate. We review the recent evidence on the relationship between occupations and inequality and discuss the following four overarching theoretical perspectives: occupations and skills, occupations and tasks, occupations and institutions, and occupations and culture. We show that each perspective has strong implications for how scholars conceptualize occupations and which occupational characteristics are seen as relevant when explaining inequalities. Building on this, we review and critically examine the relevant theories related to and the mechanisms of the relationship between occupation and wage inequality, as an example. We conclude that there is sound empirical knowledge available on the relationships between occupations and inequality; however, some of the mechanisms are still unclear.

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Health Equity and a Paradigm Shift in Occupational Safety and Health

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Despite significant improvements in occupational safety and health (OSH) over the past 50 years, there remain persistent inequities in the burden of injuries and illnesses. In this commentary, the authors assert that addressing these inequities, along with challenges associated with the fundamental reorganization of work, will require a more holistic approach that accounts for the social contexts within which occupational injuries and illnesses occur. A biopsychosocial approach explores the dynamic, multidirectional interactions between biological phenomena, psychological factors, and social contexts, and can be a tool for both deeper understanding of the social determinants of health and advancing health equity. This commentary suggests that reducing inequities will require OSH to adopt the biopsychosocial paradigm. Practices in at least three key areas will need to adopt this shift. Research that explicitly examines occupational health inequities should do more to elucidate the effects of social arrangements and the interaction of work with other social determinants on work-related risks, exposures, and outcomes. OSH studies regardless of focus should incorporate inclusive methods for recruitment, data collection, and analysis to reflect societal diversity and account for differing experiences of social conditions. OSH researchers should work across disciplines to integrate work into the broader health equity research agenda.

1. Introduction

Increased levels of disease and poverty among workers during the industrial revolution led Rudolf Virchow and others to establish the field of social medicine, which explores how social and economic conditions affect health, disease, and the practice of medicine [ 1 ]. However, the field of occupational safety and health (OSH) has evolved over the past half-century from its historic roots in social medicine into a largely technical field that focuses on identifying and eliminating physical, chemical, biological, and ergonomic hazards found in the workplace [ 2 , 3 ]. Rooted in the biomedical model of health [ 4 ], OSH generally utilizes a reductionist approach to isolate and address single, proximate factors that “cause” an injury or illness. This model has led to significant improvements in worker health over the past 50 years [ 5 ]. Nevertheless, persistent inequities in the burden of occupational injuries and illnesses, as well as challenges associated with the fundamental reorganization of the world of work [ 6 ], highlight the need to expand the current paradigm to account for the social contexts within which occupational injuries and illnesses occur [ 7 , 8 , 9 ]. Consideration of the role that social institutions and norms play in the inequitable distribution of work-related risks and benefits across society, and resultant issues of health equity, are central to this shift in OSH from a biomedical to a biopsychosocial approach [ 4 ]. A biopsychosocial approach takes a more holistic view by exploring the dynamic, multidirectional interactions between biological phenomena, psychological factors, and social relationships and contexts, which constitute processes of human development over the life course.

While the biomedical model circumscribes most OSH research, it is important to recognize that the field has increasingly embraced research on health inequities, including a growing commitment over the past two decades from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) to conduct and support health equity-focused research. For example, over the past five years the NIOSH Occupational Health Equity Program has worked to expand these research efforts and promote a biopsychosocial approach across the field. This article discusses a paradigm shift to a biopsychosocial approach and then describes in detail how this shift may impact three key areas of OSH: research that explicitly examines occupational health inequities, incorporation of inclusive methods across OSH research, and integration of work into health equity research.

2. A Paradigm Shift to Advance Health Equity

Central to the current approach to OSH is the biomedical model of medicine, which focuses on identifying a specific physical cause for illness or injury and eliminating it [ 4 ]. The field of epidemiology in general and the tools of OSH epidemiology and surveillance have become increasingly tied to this epistemology. This approach has contributed to significant declines in work-related illness and injury over the past 50 years [ 5 ]. There is growing recognition, however, of the need for a more holistic and nuanced perspective on work and its impact on population health [ 10 , 11 , 12 ]. The declines in worker illnesses and injuries have not been distributed evenly across worker populations. Factors such as growing social inequality (along the lines of race/ethnicity, gender, and other social axes), restructuring of employer-employee relationships, and subcontracting practices that externalize risk highlight the need to account for the impact of the wider social context on work-related health outcomes [ 13 ]. These challenges lead us toward a biopsychosocial approach (viewing health within a social context) in OSH.

The concept of social determinants of health (SDOH), or how the structuring of society impacts the health and well-being of individuals and populations, can be useful towards understanding the biopsychosocial model of health. Social structures are dynamic and are continually shaped and reshaped by the distribution of power, money, and resources embedded in the social, political, and economic organization of society [ 14 , 15 ]. Work itself is a social determinant that affects the distribution of injuries, illnesses, health and well-being in society [ 10 ]. Work is currently listed as contributing to two (employment stability and social and community context) of the five key domains of SDOH within the Healthy People 2030 framework [ 16 ]. Many social determinants shape the inequitable distribution of work-related health risks and benefits [ 12 ]. Social determinants of health also often interact and overlap with one another in ways that can further privilege or disadvantage individual workers [ 17 ].

Social structures influence more than just the distribution of health and safety exposures, risks, and outcomes. They also contribute to exclusionary research, prevention, and mitigation practices which are often inadvertently tailored to the normative group [ 18 ]. As a result, those most in need of benefiting from preventive interventions are often least likely to receive them [ 19 , 20 ]. Public health interventions that do not account for these structural limitations can actually aggravate inequities as they often disproportionally help members of socially privileged groups [ 21 ].

3. Work, Health Inequities, and Society

Not all workers have the same risk of experiencing a work-related injury or illness, even when they have the same job. The way societies configure social and economic institutions creates the social conditions that influence workers’ exposures to occupational hazards (differential exposure) and their abilities to cope with risks or adverse consequences of an occupational injury or illness (differential susceptibility) [ 22 ]. Occupational health inequities are avoidable differences in work-related injury and illness incidence, morbidity and mortality that are closely linked with social, economic, and environmental disadvantage resulting from social arrangements [ 23 ]. Perhaps the three most salient social determinants of worker health are structures of social groups, industries, and jobs. Workers from certain groups, such as racialized/ethnic minorities and immigrants, are sorted into and overrepresented in dangerous occupations [ 24 , 25 ], receive differential treatment on the job [ 26 ], and have limited access to worker protection resources and benefits [ 27 , 28 ]. Industry structures can favor the health and well-being of some workers over others through, for example, the competitive bidding process and practice of externalizing costs, risks, and liability from large corporations to smaller ones through the use of sub-contracting arrangements [ 13 , 29 ]. Similarly, non-standard work arrangements, shift work, and considerations of autonomy at work are just some of the ways jobs are structured that also impact the distribution of work-related benefits and risks [ 30 , 31 , 32 ]. Furthermore, work’s influence on health and illness goes beyond the specific conditions at work. Indeed, the structure of one’s job or career exerts a significant influence over other aspects of life that contribute or detract from an individual’s health and that of their family such as income, social status, housing, access to healthcare, and leisure time. While work is a social determinant that contributes to inequities, it can also be a principal mechanism for securing fundamental needs and increasing health equity and well-being [ 10 , 33 , 34 , 35 ].

4. Towards the Integration of a Biopsychosocial Approach to OSH Research

A biopsychosocial approach to OSH explicitly takes into account the role that social arrangements play in the inequitable distribution of work-related risks and benefits and can be a tool for both deeper understanding of the social determinants of health and advancing health equity [ 3 ]. The integration of a health equity perspective into OSH research requires organizational changes to:

• Promote research focused on identifying, understanding and ameliorating OSH-related inequities that are closely linked with social, economic, and environmental disadvantage;
• Integrate inclusive research practices across the OSH field so that the knowledge base reflects societal diversity and accounts for differing experiences of social conditions; and
• Develop a better understanding of how work-related constructs contribute to the inequitable distribution of illness, injury, mortality, and wellbeing in society and how the world of work could be leveraged to improve community health.

4.1. Research Focused on Occupational Health Inequities

Traditional fields of study used in OSH, such as industrial hygiene, often utilize studies that test very specific exposure/disease associations via risk assessment tools and worksite analysis to evaluate potential physical, chemical, and biological risks. Epidemiologic research that focuses on health inequities allows us to distinguish the most salient determinants, industries, and worker populations for understanding inequities. While these studies are key for documenting population-level occupational health inequities, the analysis is often limited to a single or limited set of variables. Yet, since the social position of any individual is a complex, interwoven set of identities based on asymmetrical power relationships along social axes such as race/ethnicity, sex/gender, nativity, and class [ 36 , 37 ], there is a need for research on relationships and interactions between these factors, as well as more contextualized analyses. Increasing research that aims to understand the social and structural factors that influence OSH risks, exposures, and outcomes, and the relationships between these factors, is essential.

Workers from groups that are socially marginalized are often disproportionately exposed to structural disadvantages related to other social determinants of OSH. For example, immigrants and racialized/ethnic minorities are overrepresented in contingent work arrangements [ 38 ] and foreign-born workers are overrepresented in small construction firms and receive less training and less overall safety communication than those employed by large companies [ 27 ]. These overlapping structural vulnerabilities [ 17 ] result in what Gravel and Dubé have termed “cumulative precarity,” meaning social and structural factors interact to create risks greater than the sum of the risk from each individual factor [ 39 ]. Overlapping structural vulnerabilities, and the ways they create cumulative precarity, need to be systematically investigated to bring a more complete picture of how occupational health inequities operate [ 40 ].

In addition to identifying which social factors, individually or in combination, contribute to occupational health inequities, research is also needed to characterize how structural disadvantages materialize at the worksite and in the lives of workers. For example, in 2019, foreign-born individuals made up two-thirds of occupational fatalities among Latinos in the United States despite the fact that immigrants represent only about one third of the Latino population in the United States [ 41 ]. However, few studies explore factors related to the immigrant experience that may lead to increased work-related fatalities. One such study examines how the assignment of an “undocumented” status results in a complex web of economic and social consequences that places workers at increased risk for occupational injury or illness and limits their ability to address the risks they face at work [ 42 ]. Developing an understanding of what contributes to the distribution of risks across different worker groups, industries, and occupations (not solely in terms of individual worker characteristics, but rather a deep inquiry into the social and structural conditions that shape workers’ lives) is essential to creating effective strategies to reduce these inequities.

Intervention research needs to engage an equity lens. Efforts to address occupational health inequities generally attempt to integrate workers from disadvantaged groups into existing institutional practices and paradigms that focus on the individual worker within the context of the immediate workplace [ 8 , 43 ]. These efforts tend to emphasize improving workers’ safety knowledge and promoting behavioral modifications with workers, an approach that has limited success [ 44 ]. A small but growing literature documents efforts to culturally tailor interventions [ 28 ]. While these efforts often acknowledge social constraints that may contribute to increased risk, they generally focus on integrating creative and inclusive teaching methods. Safety knowledge and behavior modification often remain the focus of the intervention. Unfortunately, much of the work to address occupational health inequities often relies on simplistic, individualistic and uncritical models of culture that reinforce the predominant worldview that the workers’ ‘otherness’ is both the cause of inequalities and the target for interventions [ 45 ]. For example, commonplace descriptions of immigrant and racialized/ethnic minority workers as “hard-to-reach” suggests that it is something about “them” (i.e., language, culture, mistrust of institutions, and other factors) that limits the services they receive from OSH organizations. Framing the issue in this way hides the fact that safety and health institutions have evolved to better meet the needs of workers from the cultural majority or normative group more than those from other social groups. A first step in acknowledging and addressing these institutional limitations would be to change the conceptualization of these workers from “hard to reach” to “hardly reached”—in other words, asking not what makes these workers “hard to reach”, but rather asking what organizations need to do to develop the institutional capacity to more effectively work with an increasingly multicultural and diverse workforce [ 46 ].

4.2. Integrate Inclusive Research Practices across OSH

While not all OSH research needs to have a primary focus on health inequities, all research should account for the diversity in the workforce and the influence that exclusionary social structures have on work-related risks, exposures, and outcomes as well as on OSH research design itself. Currently, concerns over health inequities are largely the domain of individual standard bearers or specific programs within larger institutions. Integrating equity more thoroughly, through inclusive OSH research and interventions, will require converting individual concerns into a core institutional value and implementing practices that better address the realities of a diverse workforce. In short, this will require a shift in organizational culture from individual concern for health equity to institutionalized practice [ 47 ]. This transition not only addresses ethical concerns related to inclusion, but will make for better science, as designs and interpretations will take into better account real-world contexts and represent a broader range of worker experiences.

As mentioned above, the exclusionary social structures that operate within society at large also operate within OSH organizations [ 3 ]. As a result, the assumptions, practices and approaches that guide OSH research have, often inadvertently, evolved to more effectively serve the needs of workers from some social groups more than others [ 18 , 21 ]. Identifying and correcting these exclusionary assumptions, practices and approaches is essential to ensuring that OSH research is responsive to the diversity within the workforce and effectively accounts for the social context within which research and practice related to worker safety and health take place [ 48 ]. Identifying and enumerating all of the potential ways that social context may contribute to exclusionary research practices is a daunting task. To simplify, we have identified three key areas that may be a good place to begin.

4.2.1. Structural Invisibility

As the old adage goes, “you can’t fix what you don’t see” [ 49 ]. Structural invisibility results from society’s privileging and paying attention to the experiences of some social groups over others [ 50 ]. One way this privileging occurs is through data collection and analysis. The principal way that OSH institutions “see” reality is through data. The limitations of OSH surveillance systems to collect demographic and other data relevant to the experiences of historically underrepresented groups such as racialized/ethnic minorities and immigrants is well documented [ 10 , 51 , 52 ]. Data on social factors that potentially contribute to the inequitable distribution of work-related benefits and risks are often not collected, analyzed or published, thus rendering occupational health inequities and the social conditions that shape them invisible to researchers and institutions. Some research practices that contribute to structural invisibility include: lack or superficial treatment of socioeconomic variables by data collection instruments [ 53 ]; not accurately collecting socioeconomic data [ 52 ]; exclusionary recruitment practices and underrepresentation of workers from minority groups in study samples [ 54 ]; and an absence of or inadequate data analysis plan to identify potential occupational health inequities [ 55 , 56 ].

Common analytical perspectives and practices developed within the dominant social structure reflect the myopic and reductionist approach of the biomedical model which “asks only biological questions about what are in fact biosocial phenomena” [ 14 ] (p. 1686). For example, standard practices in epidemiology such as interpreting race as an individual demographic characteristic rather than a social construct or statistically adjusting for race instead of investigating the root causes of racial inequalities can reinforce ideas of biologic determinism and reify them in the scientific literature [ 55 , 56 ]. The result is a decontextualization of occupational injuries and illnesses that hides the social drivers of the inequities which further, albeit erroneously, reinforces the biomedical paradigm. It also has real world consequences as the scientific results impact the scope and focus of future research as well as decisions on intervention resource allocation, thus perpetuating the inequities that have been rendered invisible. For example, statistically controlling for sex in analysis of data on urinary tract infections (UTI) implies that women’s higher rate of UTI is entirely attributable to anatomical difference [ 57 ]. The result is that social factors that may be contributing to these disparities, such as reduced access to restroom facilities for female employees relative to males, are made invisible. The real-world consequence is that the potential solution of increasing access to restroom facilities for female employees is overlooked. More sophisticated data collection and analytical approaches, rooted in the biopsychosocial paradigm, are required to create a fuller, more accurate picture in which the range of worker experiences can be visible.

4.2.2. Institutionalized Exclusion

Central to the biomedical model is the scientific method, which is based on the belief that replicable experimentation results in objective, generalizable knowledge of biological processes which can be used to identify and eliminate injury and illness. Alternately, a biopsychosocial approach recognizes that scientific inquiry itself is socially constructed and its evolution has been circumscribed by the same exclusionary social structures (race, class, gender, nativity, and other factors) that result in occupational health inequities [ 9 , 58 ]. “Studying up” or turning the analytical gaze back on scientific inquiry and research practices allows us to identify how exclusionary social structures are often codified in research practices, instruments, and scientific models resulting in an inherent bias in favor of the normative group [ 59 ].

There is a long history of male bias in scientific modeling and data production [ 60 ]. For example, toxicology defines the standard human as a 70 kg male (definition has now been updated to 80 kg male), treating females simply as smaller males. This scientific practice clearly demonstrates a bias towards the normative group in US society (men) and as a result, toxicological research may not account for important biological differences between males and females. Similarly, personal protective equipment (PPE) has been designed based on anthropometric measurements taken from military recruits in the United States during the 1950s to 1970s, a sample that was largely male and white [ 61 ]. The result is a decrease in the ability to achieve good fits for PPE for women, people of color, and individuals with body sizes or shapes that do not conform to those of military recruits [ 62 ]. Bias in scientific models is not only carried over from legacies of the past but continues to be introduced today. For example, anecdotal evidence suggests that modeling and development of work-related exoskeletons are developed to fit the male form which can lead to poor comfort and low acceptance by women [ 63 ]; similar concerns have been raised around the integration of bias in the development of artificial intelligence [ 64 ]. Identifying exclusionary scientific research practices, instruments, and scientific models and finding ways to correct them is an essential, yet often overlooked, element of addressing occupational health inequities and ensuring that the benefits of OSH research are shared equally, by all.

4.2.3. Unexamined Assumptions

Scientists may not be objective observers but rather actors that occupy social positions within society that influence how they perceive the world and their research [ 65 ]. Research is circumscribed by the social context within which it develops and is impacted by the cultural norms and biases of the scientists themselves [ 18 ]. These biases and norms may underlie all aspects of research studies, from what questions get asked and the methods used to answer them, to the interpretations of results and how a given study is presented to and received by research and practice communities [ 66 , 67 , 68 ]. Failure to recognize the impact of these social arrangements on research poses epistemological barriers that potentially affect the interpretation of data and construction of knowledge [ 69 ]. However, this is easier said than done. The perspectives and assumptions of the normative group are frequently perceived as commonsensical and universal rather than culturally bound, especially by members of that group [ 70 ]. These perspectives are socially sanctioned, normalized and empowered through institutions such as media, laws, education systems, and institutional practices, and often permeate research without attention or reflection [ 71 ]. Accounting for assumptions that result from one’s social position and disciplinary conventions is essential to conducting inclusive research [ 72 ]. Just as individual worker’s social positions are complex, dynamic, and interwoven sets of identities based on asymmetrical power relationships along social axes that balance privilege and exclusion, so too are the social positions and identities of researchers [ 37 ]. As a researcher, understanding one’s position within this complex social web and how that position circumscribes one’s perspective of the world and one’s approach to public health requires an interactive process of education, reflection and action [ 36 , 73 ].

Conceptual approaches and reflexive practices, such as cultural humility, help researchers recognize that they bring culturally bound assumptions to their work which need to be identified and made explicit [ 74 , 75 , 76 ]. Involving researchers and study partners from diverse social and disciplinary backgrounds and fostering a culture of inclusion that openly discusses these differences and their potential impacts on the research is essential to identifying and addressing unexamined assumptions within the research [ 77 ]. Reflecting on the positionality of those involved in the project is an essential step to engage in these discussions. For example, the authors have been able to draw on their intersectional identities belonging to non-normative groups such as women, LGBTQ people, black people, multiracial people, people from working-class family backgrounds, and people with family experiences as refugees and immigrants, to provide insights for this commentary into how society excludes the experiences of some individuals along multiple social axes. The authors’ experiences of privilege associated with their education levels, employment with the federal government, and identities as white, male, heterosexual, upper-class family background and native-born US citizens have influenced their awareness and perceptions of the dynamics of exclusion and privilege. This mix of personal experiences, together with their professional training and work experiences outlined in their biographies, contextualize the perspectives outlined in this paper.

Another way to make unexamined assumptions of the research team explicit is to incorporate practices and methods that can help identify assumptions in research designs and data collection instruments, and analysis, such as cognitive testing, when developing data collection instruments [ 78 , 79 ]. This is even true when using well-established, validated instruments [ 80 ]. Box 1 contains an example that highlights the importance of accounting for the assumptions of the research team. More robust approaches to identify and address the unexamined assumptions of researchers are needed to truly ensure research projects are inclusive of the workforce diversity and that the data collected accurately reflects the experience of all of the respondents.

Not All Perspectives are Created Equal.

The following example comes from a larger study [ 81 ] of tuberculosis (TB) among Latino immigrant workers and has been simplified to highlight some of the key concepts in this section such as unexamined assumptions and socially endorsed perspectives. It should not be taken as a scientific reporting of the results of the individual interviews but rather as an example of how exclusionary practices can manifest themselves in practice.

During a formative investigation of tuberculosis (TB) among Latino immigrant workers, participants were asked if the results of their TB test were positive, to which many answered “yes”. When asked if they were taking their medicine several answered “no”. According to the researchers’ understandings of the questions as they had written them, these results would have been interpreted as indicating that these workers had test results that indicated the presence of TB, that they required medication, and that they were noncompliant with their treatment.

However, to account for any possible unexamined assumptions, a modified cognitive testing protocol was integrated into the interview. This additional step asked the respondents to explain to the researchers how they understood the key concepts in the interview. A common answer was that a “positive TB test result” was good news that meant they were not sick and therefore did not need medicine.

While different, both the researchers’ and the respondents’ understanding of “positive test result” are reasonable, yet they are not treated equally by public health institutions and society in general. Had the respondents’ interpretations not been uncovered during cognitive testing, the researchers’ initial interpretations of these workers having TB and being noncompliant with treatment would have held as a result of the investigation. Had these findings been published they would have become reified in the scientific literature, further reinforcing the researchers’ perspective. The erroneous findings would not only have misrepresented the lives of these workers, but the results would potentially have influenced the focus and funding of future research and interventions on topics that were not addressing the real needs of this community.

4.3. The World of Work and Health Inequities

Socioecological models have long recognized that the impact of employment on health goes beyond conditions at work. Indeed, as described above, one’s job exerts a significant influence over other aspects of life that contribute to or detract from an individual’s health and that of their family [ 35 , 82 , 83 ]. However, the classification of exposures and outcomes as work-related or not often separates occupational health research and practice from the rest of public health and work-related variables are largely absent from health equity research [ 3 , 22 ]. Despite these limitations, there is a small but growing body of literature that explores work as a causal pathway of health inequities. For example, recent analyses show that higher education does not confer the same benefit of access to safe and higher quality jobs, with demonstrable inequities in late life cognitive function [ 84 ] and all-cause mortality [ 85 ]. In other words, education’s protective effects through occupation (i.e., higher education leading to better jobs and better health) differ by race and gender. Greater attention to the relationship between work and health by population health researchers is essential to improving our understanding of work as a social determinant of health inequities and its potential to mitigate them [ 34 ].

Since work has a significant impact on the ability to secure the basic needs that provide the foundation for health and well-being, it directly and indirectly intersects with and influences many of the other social determinants of health. Therefore, the world of work has powerful potential to be leveraged to address health inequities in general, not only those classified as “occupational.” At the societal level, labor policies and workforce development initiatives that improve the quality of jobs and increase access to “decent work” can be analyzed and understood through a public health lens [ 86 ]. Further research is needed to fully explicate the promise of public health impacts beyond the workplace of labor- and work-focused policies and interventions, such as job security, wage and hour laws, paid sick leave, and other factors [ 87 ]. At the organizational level, issues related to work design, such as contract, wage, hour, and benefit structures, can improve worker health and well-being on and off the job [ 88 ]. Innovative practices around, for example, safety culture, work stress, and work-life balance are already implemented by organizations. The biopsychosocial approach extends the way organizations consider the costs and benefits of these strategies, as the impacts likely interact with non-work factors to amplify results. Indeed, there is a growing body of literature that elaborates the conceptual rationale and explores the business case for expanding the breadth of workplace wellness programs to include a social determinants perspective [ 89 ]. The Total Worker Health ® framework is an effort to operationalize the broader conceptualization of the relationship between work and health so that it can be implemented and studied [ 90 ]. Conversely, the inclusion of work and social factors related to occupation in broader public health and health equity research and practice is vital to understanding and taking advantage of the intersection of work with other aspects of individuals’ and communities’ lives. Work’s potential as an intervention site to provide access to resources and improve social determinants of health is a powerful, yet underutilized tool, in addressing health inequities [ 33 ].

5. Conclusions

Health equity is a central element of a larger paradigm shift to a biopsychosocial approach to OSH. This shift requires a change in organizational culture that makes health equity an institutionalized element of practice aligned with organizational values rather than the domain of individual concern. While this shift does not require all research to focus on health equity, it does require all research to engage in inclusive methods that address concerns around structural invisibility, institutionalized exclusion and unexamined assumptions. How quickly and successfully OSH organizations adapt to this paradigm shift will largely depend on the institutional support given to this transition. Within the biomedical model that has dominated OSH over the past 50 years, research on the technical aspects of OSH has been privileged over research that explores its social aspects [ 3 , 22 , 91 ]. As a result, the social sciences are underrepresented in work on occupational safety and health and the field has developed a limited ability to account for the historical and social context that circumscribe the injury experience and contribute to elevated rates of injuries among workers from certain groups.

Integration of social scientists into occupational safety and health is essential to improving the depth, breadth and quality of research and interventions that address occupational health inequities. It is also a prerequisite for developing the institutional capacity to embrace a paradigm shift to the biopsychosocial approach. Successful integration of social scientists will require organizations to increase their internal capacity, expand external interest and foreground the social perspective. Perhaps the most commonsensical and effective approach to building institutional capacity in the social sciences will be to prioritize directly hiring professionals from underrepresented fields such as medical anthropology, health communications, sociology, social epidemiology, and translation research. Our own team for this paper represents some of the leaders in occupational health equity at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a federal government institution that is steeped in the normative culture of the United States and has extensive global reach and influence. Our training comes from diverse fields of anthropology, population health, and epidemiology and our experience covers surveillance, quantitative and qualitative methods, health communication, translation and intervention research, and public health programs and partnerships. Our work at NIOSH has cut across organizational lines as we have worked to promote health equity within our divisions and are moving as an Institute towards embracing the sorts of cultural shifts in norms, values, and practices described herein.

However, direct hires alone are not enough. Generating interest in OSH among nontraditional academic departments and professional organizations will be essential to improving occupational health equity research. It is easy to see how specific concerns around occupational health equity, such as gender inequity in exoskeleton design, racial bias in artificial intelligence, discrimination and workplace stress, alternative work arrangements and substance abuse, could be of interest to researchers in gender and ethnic studies, communications, anthropology and sociology, among others. In addition, an expanded framing of the relationship among work, health and inequity through sociocultural, biopsychosocial, and social determinants lenses not only makes OSH relevant to a larger number of academic fields but also leverages the awareness of these relationships that was built during the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, making explicit the implicit connections between public health, OSH, and the social sciences more broadly will go a long way in bridging the gap between OSH and the social sciences and improving our understanding of the social dimensions of worker health and well-being. Finally, ensuring social science perspectives influence the organizational direction, strategic plans, and budget decisions of OSH organizations is essential to promoting health equity research. Foregrounding a social perspective in OSH organizations will require the participation of social scientists in internal leadership positions as well as external influencers through their service on such bodies as advisory boards and grant review committees. The question left to these organizations is: How can we best leverage this moment to institutionalize a biopsychosocial approach to OSH?

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Joanna Mishtal and Shannon Guillot-Wright for their review and thoughtful comments on the initial draft of this manuscript.

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, M.A.F. and P.C.; writing—original draft preparation, M.A.F., A.L.S. and J.M.S.; writing—review and editing, P.C., A.L.S., J.M.S. and L.N.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

This research received no external funding.

Institutional Review Board Statement

Informed consent statement, data availability statement, conflicts of interest.

The authors declare no conflict of interest. The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Make Your Note

Digital Economy: A Leveller or A Source of Economic Inequality

• 26 Sep 2024

India will be a Global Player in The Digital Economy.

— Sunder Pichai

The digital economy , defined by the pervasive use of digital technologies to deliver goods and services, has revolutionised the global economic landscape. It offers transformative potential for innovation, productivity, and inclusivity. On one hand, it provides new opportunities for wealth creation and democratises access to information and markets. On the other hand, concerns have emerged about its role in exacerbating economic inequality. Whether the digital economy acts as a leveller or as a source of economic inequality depends on several factors, including access to technology, skills, policy interventions, and market dynamics.

The digital economy, in many ways, has the potential to act as a powerful equaliser. It reduces the significance of geographic location and physical infrastructure, allowing businesses and individuals to engage in the global marketplace from virtually anywhere. This democratisation of access to markets and information enables small businesses and entrepreneurs in developing regions to compete with larger, more established companies, thereby levelling the playing field. For example, e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, and Etsy have allowed small businesses to access global customers, bypassing traditional market barriers.

India’s digital identity program, Aadhaar , and the Unified Payments Interface (UPI) have revolutionised access to financial services. Aadhaar has enabled millions of Indians to open bank accounts and access government services, while UPI has made digital payments seamless and accessible, even in rural areas. Indian e-commerce giants like Flipkart and Snapdeal have empowered small businesses to reach a national audience. These platforms provide sellers with the tools and infrastructure needed to compete with larger companies.

Digital Education Platforms like digital websites and learning apps have transformed the education sector and made education affordable and accessible for the students who live in remote areas. Digital education industry has made quality education accessible to students across the country, regardless of their location.

Several companies are leveraging digital technologies to connect farmers directly with markets, reducing intermediaries and ensuring better prices for their produce . Open Network for Digital Commerce (ONDC) is the government initiative aimed to democratise digital commerce by providing an open network for all stakeholders, including small retailers, to participate in the digital economy.

Digital platforms also foster inclusivity in the labour market. Several freelancing platforms have made it easier for individuals with digital skills to find work, regardless of their location. This phenomenon has particularly benefited people in developing countries, where high unemployment rates and limited local opportunities exist. By enabling people to participate in the global economy from their own homes, the digital economy creates new opportunities for economic mobility.

Despite its potential as a leveller, the digital economy can also exacerbate economic inequality, especially when access to digital resources is unevenly distributed. The "digital divide" , the gap between those who have access to the internet and digital technologies and those who do not, is a significant driver of inequality in the digital economy. In many parts of the world, particularly in rural and low-income areas, access to high-speed internet remains limited. This lack of access prevents individuals and businesses from taking full advantage of digital opportunities , thus reinforcing existing economic disparities.

Furthermore, the digital economy has given rise to a winner-takes-all dynamic in certain industries. Tech giants like Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple dominate their respective markets, amassing vast amounts of wealth and power. This concentration of wealth among a few major players contributes to the widening gap between the rich and the poor. Smaller companies and startups find it challenging to compete with these digital giants, leading to reduced competition and fewer opportunities for smaller players to thrive.

Another factor exacerbating inequality is the polarisation of the labour market. While the digital economy creates high-paying jobs for highly skilled workers in technology and data science , it often leaves low-skilled workers behind. Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are replacing many low- and medium-skilled jobs, particularly in manufacturing, retail, and transportation. Workers without the skills to transition into the digital economy face unemployment or underemployment, exacerbating economic inequality.

Moreover, the gig economy, a prominent feature of the digital economy, presents mixed outcomes for workers. While gig platforms like Uber, and DoorDash etc. offer flexible work opportunities, they often come with low wages, job insecurity, and a lack of benefits. Workers in these sectors, particularly in developing economies, are vulnerable to exploitation and economic instability, further entrenching inequality.

To ensure that the digital economy acts as a leveller rather than a source of inequality, governments and institutions must implement targeted policy interventions. Bridging the digital divide is essential. Investments in digital infrastructure , particularly in underserved regions, are crucial to ensuring that everyone can participate in the digital economy. This includes expanding access to affordable high-speed internet, providing digital literacy training , and ensuring that marginalised communities have the necessary tools to benefit from digital opportunities.

Moreover, policies aimed at regulating the dominance of tech giants are necessary to foster a competitive digital economy. Regulations that promote fair competition can help create a more level playing field for smaller businesses and startups . Additionally, labour laws that protect gig economy workers and ensure fair wages, job security , and access to benefits are crucial to preventing exploitation and reducing economic inequality.

Educational reforms are also needed to equip workers with the skills required to succeed in the digital economy. Governments should prioritise STEM education and v ocational training, particularly in areas related to technology and data science, to prepare the workforce for the jobs of the future. Lifelong learning programs and reskilling initiatives are also essential for helping workers adapt to the rapidly changing economic landscape.

The digital economy holds immense potential to act as a leveller by democratising access to information, markets, and opportunities. However, without proactive measures to address the digital divide, market concentration, and labour market polarisation, it risks exacerbating economic inequality. The challenge for policymakers, businesses, and societies is to ensure that the benefits of the digital economy are broadly shared, and that no one is left behind in this digital transformation. Through targeted interventions and inclusive policies, the digital economy can become a force for equality, rather than a source of division.

Digital Transformation is a Fundamental Reality for Businesses Today.

— Warren Buffett