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An important topic in the study of segregation are comparisons across space and time. This article extends current approaches in segregation measurement by presenting a five-term decomposition procedure that can be used to understand more clearly why segregation has changed or differs between two comparison points. Two of the five terms account for differences in segregation that are due to the differing marginal distributions (e.g., the gender and occupational distributions), while one term accounts for differences in segregation due the different structure of segregation (what might be termed “pure” segregation). The decomposition thus presents a solution to the problem of margin dependency, frequently discussed in the segregation literature. Finally, two terms account for the appearance or disappearance of units when analyzing change over time. The method can be further extended to attribute structural changes to individual units, which makes it possible, for instance, to quantify the effect of each occupation on changing gender * segregation. The practical advantages of the decomposition are illustrated by two examples: a study of changing occupational gender segregation in the United States and a study of changing residential segregation in Brooklyn, New York. 

Abstract How do educational systems prepare workers for the labor market? Stratification research has often made a distinction between two ideal-types: “qualificational spaces,” exemplified by Germany with a focus on vocational education, and “organizational spaces,” exemplified by France with a focus on general education. However, most studies that investigated this distinction did so by focusing only on the size of the vocational sector, not on whether graduates with a vocational degree actually link strongly to the labor market. Moreover, they often studied male workers only, ignoring potential gender differences in how school-to-work linkages are established. In this paper, we map the change in education–occupation linkage in France and Germany between 1970 and 2010 using an approach that can distinguish between changes in rates and changes in the structure of school-to-work linkages. Surprisingly, we find that the German vocational system in 1970 was not, on average, substantially more efficient in allocating graduates to specific occupations than the French system. This finding is a major departure from earlier results, and it shows that the differences between 1970’s France and Germany, on which the qualificational-organizational distinction is based, are smaller than previously assumed. Partly, this is due to the fact that the female labor force was omitted from earlier analyses. We thus show that ignoring the female workforce has consequences for today’s conception of skill formation systems, particularly because a large share of educational expansion is caused by an increase in female enrollment in (higher) education.