1 DETERMINING THE PRESENCE AND EXTENT OF OCCUPATIONAL GENDER SEGREGATION IN THE TURKISH LABOUR MARKET By Serap Palaz B.U. Bandırma IIBF ( Paper presented at METU International Conference in Economics, September 8-11, 1999, Ankara.) ABSTRACT As is argued by several authors (OECD, 1985; Gunderson, 1985; Willborn, 1986; Reskin and Padavic, 1994) that the most important explanation for the continuing gender discrepancies in wages is occupational segregation and women's concentration in low-paying occupations. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the presence and extent of occupational segregation in Turkey for the period 1975-1990, through the decomposition of the new Karmel and Maclachlan index (KI). In addition, the contribution of the occupational groups to the overall level of segregation, using modified KI, is estimated. The results of the KI for total employment show that there has been increasing and sustained occupational segregation in the Turkish labour market during the period 1975-1990. The decomposition of the KI reveals that the main reason for the increase in the level of segregation was the increase in the gender composition of the individual occupations rather than the changes in the occupational structure or the gender composition of the labour force. Also, the estimation of KI for each occupational group display that the Production, the Administrative, the Sales and Services occupational groups make the largest contribution to the segregation index, normalised by their corresponding employment shares. However, net segregation,