Over-education and Gender Occupational Differences in Spain

This paper explores the role of over-education in shaping the negative relationship between the education level attained by employees and the fact of working in a gender-dominated occupation, in Spain, a country where the phenomenon of over-education is common. Applying multinomial logit regressions, and controlling for individual and job characteristics, the results confirm the typical finding that having a university degree decreases the odds of working in a gender-dominated occupation. However, this is only true in the case of women when considering long—more than 3 years—university studies. The evidence also suggests that the general spread of over-education in Spain weakens that relationship so that reducing over-education would eventually lead to more uniformity in the gender-distribution of employment across occupations.