Words matter when it comes to wages, prestige linked to female-associated jobs

A new sociological study evaluated more than 127 billion words found in publications over a nearly 120-year period to shine a light on the various cultural reasons why society often devalues occupations typically held by women. The study “The Cultural Devaluation of Feminized Work: The Evolution of U.S. Occupational Prestige and Gender Typing in Linguistic Representations, 1900 to 2019” by Wenhao Jiang (Duke University) is published in the American Sociological Review.

This article is brought to you by this site.

Reader’s Picks