The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released its second round of Census data in October 2022, covering, amongst other things, employment and location-based variables. Our last article focused on the gender pay gap; continuing that journey, we’re focussing here on occupation data by age and gender to see what insights might emerge.

How do jobs differ between the sexes?

Broadly speaking from our chart below, professionals rank as a top category for both men and women, then things diverge substantially; for women the next most frequent categories are in the clerical and community spheres, while tradies dominate for men.

Measuring managers

Whilst we don’t subscribe to stereotypes, some of the categories follow perhaps unsurprising gender patterns. It’s the imbalance in the Managers category that grabbed our attention - after all, management is surely gender neutral - so we decided to dig deeper into that occupation.

Charting the 1.5 million Australians aged 20-64 in 2021, those at the management level are split 60% / 40% between male and female (see inset below).

On the main bar chart however, we’ve split the numbers by age group, which tells a deeper story. Up to age 34, there’s a degree of gender parity; from there onwards we start to see the divergence between male and female that leads to the overall gulf, continuing to retirement.

Of course a contributing factor is the effect of starting a family, and that could certainly explain a drop-off in gender balance in those middling age groups. But wouldn’t we see a bounce back when those highly accomplished women get back in the swing? Women do live longer after all, so there’s no doubting their fitness to resume a career.

The numbers suggest otherwise, with the divide growing ever larger as the years roll on.

Digging deeper into occupation

If we look at occupational gender balance by age group, we can see the steady decline in percentage of female management roles and the proportional increase in female labourers. The raw numbers (shown in grey) for female labourers are one of the few for women (or men) to trend wholly upwards over time.

According to the definition of ‘Labourers’ from ABS, this includes workers involved in cleaning, trades, manufacturing and other manual tasks.

So what’s behind this trend for women to move into labourer jobs as they age?

Is it possible that women returning to work after some time out to care for children are compelled to re-enter the workforce in labourer jobs with low entry barriers. It’s a disturbing prospect that highly qualified workers are forced to compromise in this way, but I’m sure most of us sense some anecdotal truth in this.

Another hypothesis is that a sufficient proportion of women leaving the workforce to experience motherhood (or for whatever reason) begin to value other pursuits in life, and prefer to explore options away from their former career role. This is a nicer thought, though whether it has legs…

Or in fact are we looking at this the wrong way - are the older age groups representative of the status quo, and the younger groups are bucking the trend? To validate this, we’d need to run the analysis over some past Census datasets and establish trends over time.

The census data has revealed some thought-provoking facts. We’ll continue with this series and provide you with more interesting facts about all aspects of Australian society.

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