Comment on robert hutchens, “Occupational segregation with economic disadvantage: an investigation of decomposable indexes”

The basic premise of Hutchens's paper is that there are cases in which measures of segregation need to take account of the relative status of the groups into which members of a population are segregated. Segregation by occupation, Hutchens argues, is in some sense worse for a group if that group is segregated into lower status occupations. Hutchens proposes several measures that incorporate group status information, shows their properties, and works out their decompositions. I argue in this comment that the measures proposed by Hutchens have questionable utility in that they combine two fundamentally dissimilar types of information: a segregation dimension and a disparity dimension.