“How do we recruit boys into female-dominated professions?” This question, asked by Harriet Swain of The Guardian is very easily answered, yet still important:
Earlier this month, the government repeated its commitment to encouraging more women into science in a response to the latest Science and Technology Committee report on the issue.
But much less support exists for a group under-represented across higher education as a whole, and in certain subjects chronically so – men.
Figures from the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service (Ucas) (pdf) show that another 20,000 men would be needed to redress the gender imbalance among nursing students, around 7,000 in education, and 10,000 each in psychology and social work. This is within the context of far higher numbers of women entering higher education generally; they are now as likely to enter as men are to even apply.
Well, the answer is sadly simple: You raise the salaries.
The reason that so-called pink-collared jobs remain populated by women is that these jobs are typically low-paying, not what a person could expect to raise a family on.
We have seen over and over again that as soon as women move into a field, the salaries drop. We became teachers, and salaries dropped below the living wage for a family. We became professors, and suddenly everything went adjunct and we can no longer earn a living at that. Even the salaries of doctors, now that women are populating that field, have dropped.
The converse is also true. When nurses started being paid better, we saw an influx of male students. According to my observations – and trust me, I spend way too much time around medical professionals these days -we are approaching gender parity already for men entering the field. Swain’s complaints ring hollow if one spends any amount of time in a high-quality, and therefore high-paying, medical facility.
These could be considered coincidences, but when you see how often a downturn or upturn in salary coincides with gender dominance in a field, coincidences become little more than theoretical. My sociologist friends tell me that my hunch is borne out by multiple studies that show exactly this.
We know how to solve the immediate problem of recruiting men into female-dominated workplaces. Now let’s focus on the real problem: How do we create a society in which all employees are valued and paid a living wage?
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In the UK the starting salaries for both nurses and teachers, jobs you’d describe as ‘pink collar’, are both above the national median income. Make no mistake these are well payed professions with incomes above the majority of traditionally male dominated blue collar jobs and comparable to other graduate level jobs.
Nurses are very well compensated. I guess if we want more women to be garbage collectors we should lower the salaries then. Nonsensical.
Forgot a sentence- we are nowhere close to gender parity in the field.
There is still quite a gap between males and females in nursing. One of the main goals for the AAMN (American Assembly of Men in Nursing) is to just have 20% of the nursing workforce be male by 2020.
“We have seen over and over again that as soon as women move into a field, the salaries drop. We became teachers, and the salaries dropped below the living wage for a family.” Uh, the special ed teacher my wife (a T.A.) works with(a woman) makes 196K a year. “When nurses started being paid better, we saw an influx of male students.” Nope. My oldest daughter is an R.N. and she makes around $ 47 an hour. Not that bad , although she definitely earns every penny. However, her college class graduated 197 women and something like 16 males. Look,… Read more »
What rings hollow is the example of the special ed teacher earning $196k. That’s not remotely close to what most special teachers make.
Check out William Floyd School District website (sorry, if I knew how to do that link thing I’d send you there directly). All the salaries are posted there.