Over-Represented Jobs

When you survey people around the country to ask what type of job they have, you get pretty consistent answers. Retail is number one in 42 states, for instance. But Business Insider looked at the data a different way: What's the most over-represented job in each state? Therein lies a more varied picture.


The answers are sometimes obvious:

• North Carolina and Georgia: textile workers
• West Virginia and Kentucky: miners
• California: farmworkers
• Nevada: gaming supervisors
• North Dakota and Oklahoma: oil and gas drillers
• Oregon and Maine: loggers
• Washington: airplane assemblers

Other times they say something about a state's economy that outsiders may only vaguely know:

• Minnesota: food scientists
• New Mexico: physicists
• Colorado: atmospheric and space scientists
• Louisiana: sailors
• Michigan: model makers (car models, I assume)

A few are a bit confounding:

• Nebraska and Alaska: butchers (okay, maybe Nebraska, but Alaska?)
• Vermont: highway maintenance workers (are there that many highways in Vermont?)
• Maryland: subway operators (what subway? The D.C. Metro?)

And then there are those that can only be answered with a resounding ?@#!?

• Missouri: psychiatric technicians
• South Carolina: tire builders
• Illinois: groundskeepers
• Pennsylvania: survey researchers

Oh, and by the way, political scientist is the most over-represented job in Washington, D.C. Pundit was probably a close second.