Then, the percent of employees in each job who are women is calculated. Generally, jobs that are 70 percent or more women are considered to be female-dominated. Those between 31 percent and 69 percent women are called balanced, meaning that there is a balance of men and women in the occupation. Jobs that are 0 to 30 percent women are called male-dominated. Sometimes, lower cutoff points for female-dominated classifications, such as 60 percent or 65 percent, are used if there are clear examples of jobs traditionally held by women that fall in the 60 percent range.
Most sex segregation analyses show that the workforce is highly sex-segregated.
And despite the fact that some women have moved into non-traditional jobs, sex segregation is still very strong. For example, women were 98 percent of all secretaries in 1970 and are still 98 percent of the occupation today. Nurses have increased from 91 percent female to 94 percent female in the last 20 years. An analysis of segregation by race should also be conducted. In this type of analysis, the percent of minority group members in each classification is calculated as a percent of the total number of employees in the classification.