I'm not sure what the source of this question is. Looks like it's from some dodgy old internet sources from a decade or two ago, but the question seems reasonable enough.
I can't find a verifiable OA, but the answer seems to be E. Here's how I would break this down:
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In the past, teachers, bank tellers, and secretaries were predominantly men; these occupations slipped in pay and status when they became largely occupied by women. Therefore, if women become the majority in currently male-dominated professions like accounting, law, and medicine, the income and prestige of these professions will also drop.
Which of the following, if true, would most likely be part of the evidence used to refute the conclusion above?
OK, let's start by locking down the conclusion. It's clear enough in this example:
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...if women become the majority in currently male-dominated professions like accounting, law, and medicine, the income and prestige of these professions will also drop.
Great. And the passage offers only a little bit of support for this conclusion: the other occupations (teachers, bank tellers, secretaries) "slipped in pay and status when they became largely occupied by women."
In other words, the logic is: pay and status dropped when women became the majority in other professions, so it would happen again if women became the majority in accounting, law, and medicine.
And now we're trying to find something that could plausibly be used to refute the conclusion.
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(A) Accountants, lawyers, and physicians attained their current relatively high levels of income and prestige at about the same time that the pay and status of teachers, bank tellers, and secretaries slipped.
This seems completely irrelevant to me. We don't care
when accountants, lawyers, and physicians started to attain high levels of income and prestige -- that has nothing whatsoever to do with whether pay & prestige will fall in the future if women begin to dominate other professions.
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(B) When large numbers of men join a female-dominated occupation, such as airline flight attendant, the status and pay of the occupation tend to increase.
Also irrelevant. We're interested in what happens when women begin to dominate a profession -- not what happens when men join a profession.
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(C) The demand for teachers and secretaries has increased significantly in recent years, while the demand for bank tellers has remained relatively stable.
That's nice. It also has nothing to do with the core question: what will happen when women enter law, accounting, and medicine?
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(D) If present trends in the awarding of law degrees to women continue, it will be at least two decades before the majority of lawyers are women.
Great, but this tells us nothing about what will happen to pay and prestige in these occupations.
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(E) The pay and status of female accountants, lawyers, and physicians today are governed by significantly different economic and sociological forces than were the pay and status of female teachers, bank tellers, and secretaries in the past.
We have a winner! Why? We're trying to find a reason why the decrease in pay/status for teachers, bank tellers, and secretaries MIGHT NOT happen again in these other professions. And this points right to it: if there are significantly different forces at work in these professions today, then history might not repeat itself in law, medicine, and accounting.
So it's definitely (E).