Le clivage hommes-femmes : une approche segmentée du marché du travail

Studies of gender tend to give a dualistic vision of the labour market, with men and women following different and standardized career paths. By retirement age, the gender gap that builds up over a working career is, according to this vision, reflected by differences in behaviour at the time of retirement and by differences in pension entitlements. The typological approach adopted in this article is used to identify representative career profiles of private sector employees. With no prior assumptions about gender stratification, we observe that certain career profiles are typically feminine and that more women than men have discontinuous careers and low wages, though a significant proportion have continuous careers and high wages. This concentration of women in low-status segments gives rise to specific retirement behaviours, some of which can be observed in the population of pensioners receiving a reduced-rate pension. This difference between male and female careers observed for employees of retirement age born between 1935 and 1940 persists among younger generations, though tends to become less pronounced. Fewer women have short or durably discontinuous careers, though they are still over-represented in groups with discontinuous careers and low wages.