This paper analyses trends of employment in New Zealand occupations by age and gender over the 1981 to 2006 period.  For the 25 years to 2006 the overall effect of the evolving changes in the occupational structure of the New Zealand resident working population has been toward convergence of gendered occupational distributions.  The rate of overall gender occupational convergence has slowed a great deal over the 25 years – but never as slowly as over the recent 2001 to 2006 intercensal period. It is clear that on current trends convergence is going to be replaced by a more complex and more balanced tableau of contrasting male and female convergence and divergence in different occupations which balance out more equally over the working population.

The picture of gender convergence in occupations largely reflects the trends of the “European and other” majority population.  To an extent this is emulated in the subpopulation of “Asian” ethnicity.  Amongst Maori and Pacific peoples the situation is different.  Recovery between 2001 and 2006 in the demand for labouring and trades occupations and the greater margins between female and male participation in the “professional” and “technicians and associate professionals” underlie increases in gender dissimilarity in occupational distribution for those ethnicity groups.

The changes in occupational distribution by gender reflect the net effect of three processes.  These are gender differences in changes in employment rates, overall changes in occupational size, and a residual gender competitive / choice effect.  This paper isolates and estimates the individual contribution of these three components of gendered changes for occupations at major, sub-major and minor group level over the period 1981 to 2006 focussing in on the 1991 to 2006 period.

The first of these factors, a large increase in employment rates of women, is an almost constant feature of the 25 years from 1981 to 2006.  This increase in female employment rates has contributed a great deal to the reduction in sex ratios amongst those employed. The underlying gendered competitive / occupational choice shifts by women are in some cases as of the same magnitude or larger than any gains due to occupational growth.  Examples of this are in the “general managers”, “architects, engineering and related professionals”, “legal professionals”, "business professionals” minor occupational groups.

The occupational competitive shifts by women have tended to be away from lower paid occupations in the “clerks” and “sales and service workers” occupational major groups and some other occupational groups such as “stationery machine operators and assemblers” and into the “”legislators, administrators and managers” and “technicians and associate professional” occupational major groups.  Within the professional occupations there is a competitive shift by women away from traditionally female dominated “nursing and midwifery” and to a lesser degree away from “primary and early childhood teaching”, “special education teaching” and “archivists, librarians and related information professionals” towards other skilled professions including “physicists, chemists and related professionals”, “architects, engineers and related professionals”, “life science professionals”, “legal professionals”, “business professionals” and “religious professionals”. 

Women have shifted toward more career path oriented professions requiring larger investments in education and training.  The rapid relative and absolute increase in female tertiary attainment relative to males and the opportunities for new entrants resulting from high rates of growth in these occupations will have contributed to the increase in female share of the jobs in these higher skilled occupational groups. 

While women have strengthened what has long been a heavy participation in white collar skilled occupations, the broad stratification of males and females by occupation in 2006 is structurally similar to that of 1981.  The high level of participation of males in some parts of the “trades” in particular, but also “agriculture and fishery” and “plant and machine operators and assemblers” is sustained in 2006.  Unfortunately for males, these areas of male predominance are occupations for which growth in demand has been highly cyclic and has not grown at the same rate as the labour market as a whole. 

Although low or negative growth relative to the labour market as a whole has also affected the “clerks” occupational major group and others which have long had high rates of participation by women, the competitive occupational shifts by women have tended to be towards higher growth and away from lower growth occupations.  After accounting for the effect of increased overall female participation in work and changes in the size of individual occupations, women have tended to increase their participation in occupations with high rates of occupational growth – which is correlated with about 20% of the differences between gender competitive / choice effects in occupational pathways chosen by women. 

A different gender occupational specialisation typology is emerging reflecting quite a different cultural pattern and life cycle strategies for education and employment life cycle histories of men and women from that which existed at the beginning of the 1980s.

The increases in employment rates and occupational competitive shifts towards skilled career occupations by women will have helped to supply the high rate of increase in market demand in many skilled and professional occupations over the 15 years.  The competitive shifts by women revealed in this study are uneven.  Some high growth skilled professional occupations such as computing professionals have seen negligible shifts towards higher rates of female participation, but these are the exceptions. Male competitive shifts have seen increasing male participation in some selected traditionally female dominated occupations such as nursing and to a lesser extent in other occupations such as “personal care workers” and “primary and early childhood teaching”. 

This working paper contributes the Institute for Policy Studies led Foundation for Research, Science and Technology funded Education capital formation, employment, migration, gender, work-life balance and missing men (Short title Missing men) project. The home page for this project is at

http://ips.ac.nz/events/completed-activities/Missing%20men/Missing%20men.html.