OCCUPATIONAL PRESTIGE AND SEX TYPING IN THE COLLECTIVE CONSCIENCE

Previous work has shown that prestige is the only factor that is consistently employed in individuals' perceptions of the occupational structure. Is is argued that these results are in part an artifact of the methods. Using direct paired comparison estimates of differences between occupations and metric MDS to analyze the data, it is shown that perceptions are highly multidimensional. The data also show that prestige and sex typing are salient features in the collective conscience of respondents. Implications for occupational choice research are discussed. © 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.