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The basic premise of Hutchens's paper is that there are cases in which measures of segregation need to take account of the relative status of the groups into which members of a population are segregated. Segregation by occupation, Hutchens argues, is in some sense worse for a group if that group is segregated into lower status occupations. Hutchens proposes several measures that incorporate group status information, shows their properties, and works out their decompositions. I argue in this comment that the measures proposed by Hutchens have questionable utility in that they combine two fundamentally dissimilar types of information: a segregation dimension and a disparity dimension.

I want to thank Paul Jargowsky for his comment. I take it as a serious comment by a thoughtful scholar. I admit, however, that I cannot make sense of much of it.

Purpose – This paper considers methods for decomposing indexes that incorporate economic disadvantage into a measure of segregation. According to such indexes, segregation in high-economic-status occupations is worse than similar segregation in low-economic-status occupations. The paper presents three decompositions of these indexes.

Methodology/Approach – The paper first characterizes a class of segregation indexes that include economic disadvantage in the index. It then develops mathematical methods for decomposing a change in such an index. The change is decomposed into two or more components: components that indicate either the effect of changes in economic disadvantage or the effect of changes in a standard measure of segregation – a measure that essentially ignores economic disadvantage. The paper then implements the decompositions using data on U.S. occupational segregation by gender between 1970 and 2000.

Findings – The primary finding is that a segregation index that incorporate economic disadvantage can be decomposed in interesting ways. A secondary finding is that such indexes indicate reduced segregation between 1970 and 2000. The dominant forces associated with the reduction were (a) the convergence of occupational gender ratios and (b) the movement of women out of less advantaged occupations and into the comparatively well-compensated professional and managerial occupations.

Research limitations/Implications – The 1970–2000 results are mainly illustrative. They are based on three broad occupational categories for which there were compatible earnings data, and the analysis could quite feasibly be done with more detailed occupational categories.

Although the measurement of segregation by gender or ethnic group in the labor force has long been of interest to both sociologists and economists, the sociology and economics literatures on this topic have evolved in different ways and remained largely separate. This has also been the case to some extent with research on the measurement of residential segregation. Although much of the segregation measurement literature is in sociology and geography, economists have contributed to this field as well, particularly in the development of measures of residential income segregation. Again, however, the economics literature has remained largely separate from that in geography and sociology.

This paper defines local segregation measures that are sensitive to status differences among organizational units. So far as we know, this is the first time that status-sensitive segregation measures have been offered in a multigroup context with a cardinal measure of status. These measures allow researchers to aggregate employment gaps of a target group by penalizing its concentration in low-status occupations. They are intended to complement rather than substitute for previous local segregation measures. The usefulness of these tools is illustrated in the case of occupational segregation by race and ethnicity in the United States.