| Summary: | American women overtook men in college graduation in the early 1980s, and now comprise 57% of new college graduates. I examine the reversal of the college gender gap through a lens of occupational choice, noting that as more women entered the labor force, women advanced into historically male college occupations (e.g. doctor, lawyer), whereas men did not make symmetric advances into historically female college jobs (e.g. nurse, teacher). Men's persistent aversion to entering female college jobs may have contributed to women's overall advantage in training for and entering college work. To understand this phenomenon, I propose a discrete choice model of occupational choice, fashioned after Berry, Levinsohn & Pakes (1995). I use the model to estimate the evolution of men and women's occupational preferences from 1960-2010. The model takes into consideration sex differences in wages, taste/aptitude for occupational tasks and educational requirements, and occupation-specific utility. The latter summarizes the utility that agents derive from unobserved occupational characteristics, and may include concerns about gender identity. I use the model to construct counterfactual occupational distributions and college graduation rates. I find that full convergence in men and women's wages would exacerbate, not undo, women's college advantage. Further, sex differences in taste/aptitude for jobs' manual and abstract task content cannot fully account for the reversal of the gender gap. In contrast, if occupation-specific utilities were the same for men and women, women's college advantage would disappear. The estimates also suggest that economic changes favoring historically female occupations may have exacerbated women's college advantage.
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