I have a cousin who was an elementary school teacher because he loved it. It's all he ever wanted to do. He has a bunch of kids of his own because he enjoys being a dad. He's that "really great with kids" guy.
In school, all he ever got was suspicion. All of the teachers and administrators and parents in schools treat male primary school teachers as if they're child molesters or think that men are totally unsuited to the job. There is _blatant_ sexism.
He lasted two years and now runs his own construction/carpentry business where he's a lot happier.
What's hilarious is that this is so uniquely cultural. My mom, who was raised with an English tutor in Bangladesh, remarked about my elementary school experience that she didn't like how all the teachers were women, because men made far more effective teachers. That is the sexism on that side of the pond--that women aren't suitable for a role that involves inculcating the knowledge and practices and morals of society.
A 'lot' of these jobs have contact with children and the news organisations have done enough damage to societies perception that a man wanting to work with children is probably a pedophile to wreck that career path.
I think it's generally the same reasons that more women don't pursue male-dominated professions. I think this is typically that there's an established culture, and not fitting in with that culture makes you seem like an oddity or that you've got ulterior motives.
Is that man teaching because he needs a job, or because he enjoys teaching? Or does he just want to prey on the girls?
Is that woman developing video games because she's a good programmer, or is she just desperate for male attention?
The biggest difference is that fewer people see this as a problem when it's affecting men. Culturally men are expected to bear their problems instead of lament them.
I suspect there are two reasons why men would push for more women in IT:
- lower wages because of higher competition (the employer's incentive)
- more "attractive" workplace winkwink (the employee's perspective)
I know it's not politically correct to say that, but don't shoot the messenger.
I don't think men feel the need for more "female perspectives" in programming. Especially as they wouldn't even know what those would suppose to be.
Women (feminists) push for more women in tech because they have seen some people become rich via tech jobs and feel left out. They don't push for more garbage women and so on.
I find it disturbing and sad that you didn't even think to mention egalitarianism in either your male or female reasons to push for more females in tech.
This is more bias against men than we are ready to admit.
I was somewhat blind to this until the wife opened a daycare in our home. When we interviewed with a new parent, she would very tactfully advise the parents that I might be in charge some days/times. The most common response was 'just let us know what days.' Which was code for: we aren't comfortable with that but we are too polite to say that while he's here. Less than half of the kids showed up the first time she took a day off. My paper airplane tournament was missing a number of contestants.
Then I had a few candid conversations with friends who had children. Almost universally wouldn't consider a male daycare provider. Or any daycare situation where a male would be even temporarily unsupervised with children.
It was disappointing to see that level of bigotry. While there aren't going to be men manning the barricades over daycare and teaching, it is something that should change. If you want your daughters to learn STEM, it might be a man teaching them. Try not to panic.
I am currently going to school to study occupational therapy--which is predominately a female dominated profession. Why did I do it? Frankly, I was getting burned out on tech, and I've always wanted to try health care out without having to over commit in terms of time and money. My program is about 3+ years including the pre-reqs, and the total cost will be only about $25000. I also didn't want to do anything really stressful like nursing. But, now that I'm actually surrounded by women, I am starting to pine for my old tech days of having guy co-workers, which often led to guy friends, talking about guy stuff.
Women are weird. They're exceptionally passive aggressive, and they love gossiping like there was a fire sale on it. It doesn't help that the few female OT's that I've had to shadow were not my cup of tea. I didn't think they were nice at all, and I could see them being overtly political or passive aggressive. Also, as others have mentioned in this thread, there is a very real bias I may have to contend with as a male in a female dominated profession.
Currently, I want to work in pediatrics. I like the idea of working in the schools and with kids. However, I DO see that others, especially women, may view that with a wary eye. It sucks.
There is a bright side though. If you're a single guy, damn, the women... Lots of pretty women. That's something that I don't miss about tech.
The assumption is that men are generally doing well under the current system, so nobody needs to encourage men to pursue careers dominated by women. I am sure there is a notion that nursing is a feminine career, but that is beside the point; the real issue is that nobody is trying to dispel that notion. The effort is focused on dispelling the notion that engineering and science are "manly" disciplines.
It also does not help that here in the USA we are trained to be automatically suspicious of men who pursue two common and traditionally female lines of work: elementary school education and childcare. A male kindergarten teacher is always at risk of being branded a pedophile by some paranoid parent, and must watch his every step in his personal life (what if he is into S&M? what if he is gay?).
The author gives "P.R. Officer" as an example of one profession typically dominated by women. When I studied public relations in college, I was one of the few guys in my classes, and I began to pose this question to others in the field.
I think part of the reason is that many guys mistakenly associate PR with publicity and event planning — activities which they view as being "for women." In reality, modern public relations is deeply intertwined with management. It's about managing a company's relationships and persuading important audiences to take action.
Publicity and event planning are tools in modern PR. To say that they're the substance of the field is like saying that computer science is about keyboards and typing.
So, what's interesting here is that the field of public relations has evolved to encompass some things that are perceived as traditionally male, including business management, strategy and law. However, many men perceive the field as it was decades ago.
To answer the OP's question, maybe men don't push for men to break into traditionally female fields because, once those fields are branded as being "for women," they cease trying to understand how the fields evolve over time.
To understand conversations about gender bias in professions, you have to understand that the American academy (and by extension, America's educated class) operates from a Marxist ideology. This casts the world in light of class conflict. In the branch of this ideology which deals with sex relations (called "feminism"), men are the oppressor class and women are the oppressed. Thus, male overrepresentation in the suicide or prison population is not a problem (men cannot be oppressed, they are the over-class). But male overrepresentation in tech is a problem, or at least it has become a problem as tech work has gained in prestige.
Male underrepresentation in traditionally female fields is not considered a problem, again because males cannot be oppressed as a class. It is true that men have fared worse than women in the recession[1], and that men have fallen behind women in educational attainment, so that an influx of men into these fields might have strong, positive effects for society. But as long as the "patriarchy" remains, it will not be a concern.
Maybe some people think like that, but prevailing academic feminist thought does not resemble what you're describing.
Modern feminism sees gender as a continuity rather than a boundary, and looks at how social gender constructs support systems of power. For example: why are men often stigmatized for becoming grade school teachers? The modern feminist (at least one with the theoretical bent you're describing) sees this as oppression and tries to come to grips with it by looking at the social constructs of masculinity and femininity, and more specifically in this case of maternity and paternity.
In a society where women are caregivers/mothers and men are builders/leaders, then individuals who do not embody those characteristics are marginalized and oppressed. And the marginalization goes both ways. In a society where men are stigmatized for embodying femininity, it will be true that women will be stigmatized for embodying masculinity.
The problem is discussed in a far more multidimensional fashion than you're describing. Marxism is used as a tool for analysis, as are many other ideologies, but is certainly not the dominant force. A (good) academic paper that uses Marxism for analysis will often say, "I'm using Marxism to analyze this topic because I feel that in spite of shortcomings A, B, and C, that I can use it to tease out this subtlety..."
I would go so far as to say that you are unapologetically building a caricature of what you're describing. Why? Because it's almost never the case that you can take an entire group of people, (in this case, the 'American academy') and apply such a sweeping generalization to their way of thought.
In fact, the modern feminist would suggest that it's your absolutist way of arguing that perpetuates this kind of system. When you say that a certain group thinks in a certain way (especially one so easily problematized), you are promulgating the same type of thinking that leads to, "Men shouldn't be teachers." The idea is that when you look at any crowd of people, do you understand that what you're looking at is not some group entity but in fact a very complex interweaving of social dynamics--personality, class, gender, sexuality, family, culture, race, age, height, weight, and all of the intersections thereof. Or do you think you have that group 'figured out' and pigeonholed? Once you have the group pigeonholed, you've denied the individuality and agency of the people in that group.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the American academy" but modern feminism has a lot to say about the negative effects of the patriarchy on men. One major example of this is the way men are pressured to work certain jobs rather than others, or to not seek help for physical or especially emotional problems.
Saying that men cannot be oppressed because they are the oppressors seems to come out mostly from MRA strawman talking points.
I would say that's about right as someone who basically espouses this way of looking at class dynamics (though I'm not sure it's really a solely Marxist view, as I am still a fan of capitalism, etc.).
One nuance that might be missing from your comment is that folks who believe this still agree that individual men can be oppressed. And some groups of men can be oppressed too -- black males come to mind. But generally, when talking about oppression, they/we are talking about systemic oppression, and would generally agree that men as a whole are not systemically oppressed, although they theoretically could be if women ever became the dominant gender.
Men are found at the very top and the very bottom of society, even in very even societies like the Scandinavian countries.
So if anything men are both the most oppressing and most oppressed class of society.
Furthermore woman normally marry upwards which makes it even harder for those already at the bottom to find a life companion and escape their situation.
All the absolutes in here make it very hard to get on board. Americans are not Marxist automatons any more than American culture is something so well-defined that you can reason about it reliably with generalizations like this.
I'm not a cultural anthropologist, so I'm not going to bother suggesting this Marxist origin theory is wrong or even not a large contributor, but I will certainly point out that you're reducing something very large and very complex involving a whole lot of vastly different people with different motivations, backgrounds, and goals to a simple, homogeneous, no-moving-parts summary that's so burdened with subjective assumptions as to be unsupportable.
The kind of reductionist feminist theory that you describe (which is neither a valid generalization of the "American academy" nor a valid generalization of "Amercia's educated class", though it has no small amount of currency in each of those domains) isn't Marxist -- or even compatible with Marxism -- its an incompatible alternative to Marxism that follows a similar outline but replaces the class conflict of the Marxism with gender conflict.
>Why are women fighting for more women to do STEM while men are not fighting for more men to be therapists?
...and Freakonomics hears: "Why don't more men pursue female-dominated professions?" Not once, but twice. Alfred writes back to clarify his meaning, yet Dubner, again, simply lifts keywords out of his sentences and writes his own question to answer. Literally failing to think outside the bounds of political tropes.
I'm glad another person noticed this. Most comments also missed the distinction.
In their defence I think the two questions have high interrelation. Why men should go into teaching and etc is the same reasons men are not campaigning for more male participation. Programming is a good career so people are willing to fight for equality. From an emotionless stand point teaching is a mediocre career so what is the point? Men who do teach do so for the caring, but they recognize the career is not for everyone. Programming on the other hand is profitable, I imagine programming women recognize that the career would be a good match for many other women.
By a similar token neither men nor women are campaigning to get more people into sanitation engineering, even if women are under represented.
The final line in what Albert writes does ask that question about the specific occupation, but right before that he had stated more generally that men are not fighting for more men to study traditionally female-dominated subjects or jobs like primary-school teacher, nurse, PR officers and therapists. So it makes sense for Dubner to address the more general "female-dominated professions" than the specific "therapists" part. I also don't see that much difference in asking "why don't more men do [some female-dominated profession]" vs. "why don't men fight for more men to do [some female-dominated profession]". I think in this situation the answers to either question are going to be largely related.
Nurse might be cool, you get to help save people's lives and make a real difference without as many barriers as becoming a doctor. Googling the average salary, though, it's 1/4 what I earn as a developer. So no way.
In the UK National Health System, a Band 5 nurse ( i.e. no longer an assistant but not yet a specialist ) earns between £21k and just under £28k, which is on par with what my IT career was after a similar period in work.
Nurses make quite good money in certain areas[1]. An old boss of mine quit his contract IT workers for hire company and formed a nurse for hire company. He makes more money for them and him[2] and doesn't have to deal with all the foolishness of IT placement. Hospitals actually like people who can provide nurses on demand.
1) My buddy said their bill rate was from $60+/hour
2) he did a 70 / 30 split if you were W2 and a 90/10 split if you were 1099. He also hired a security company to escort the nurses to and from the parking lot. This is a concern at some hospitals.
A meta-comment, which I'm separating from my main reply:
Rather a lot of the comments here seem to be reacting to this in ways that boil down to "Feminism is unfair to men!" For anyone out there who hasn't studied much of this stuff, let me warn you to be cautious buying in to those arguments. They can sound persuasively like justice; I used to nod and mutter "Yeah!" to them myself. But I have eventually recognized that if we want to achieve that goal of true equality that we all want, women have one heck of a lot more catching up to do than men.
>... women have one heck of a lot more catching up to do than men
May I ask what criteria you used to come to that conclusion? What do you use to measure equality? You seem to have analyzed both sides and I'm curious to hear how you arrived at your conclusion.
So, languages and dialects have some sort of (nebulously defined) level of prestige relative to any particular population, and the prestige of a particular language/dialect is one of those factors for a bunch of cultural phenomena, such as where and whether it's appropriate to use a particular language/dialect in a particular social setting, and whether a language is taught to children, etc, etc, etc.
Anyway, point being, prestige is also one of those things you see in careers too. It may be that there aren't more men banging down the doors to get into dietetics and nursing because those jobs aren't perceived to be as prestigious as being a doctor.
People aspire to being the President of the United States, or a doctor, or lawyer or whatever. They don't aspire to being middle management, or nursing home attendants, or city clerks.
(p.s. I think that gender imbalance in any field is questionable/problematic. But on a pragmatic basis there's actual material harm when all of the prestigious and high earning fields are particularly biased.)
Recently we (my wife and I) were on the search for a replacement nanny as our nanny of 2 years was going back to school. During the process, my wife posted to Facebook asking her friends what they thought about a "manny" she found. I was shocked at the whole situation.
First, even just the fact that it seems perfectly legit to call him a "manny" was enough. I can't even imagine how much the internet would explode if someone questioned hiring "womengineers."
Second, the fact that the question is even asked. Like there is something EXTRA we need to look at when hiring a man as a nanny that we would not look at for a woman. Skills are skills. A background check is a background check.
Lastly, I was appalled by the women that spoke up about how sketchy it was and that they would advise against it. Thankfully, there were people that spoke up about it being no different. That it would be great to have our boys see a man in such a role.
Ultimately, he didn't make the cut. But this was not a male/female reason. But seeing what I saw, I do feel a bit sorry for the guy as I'm sure this happens more than he knows. I'm sure he has missed out on great jobs because too many of people's friends thought it was too sketchy.
A while ago I watched a Norwegian documentary questioning various aspects of Norwegian society. One segment dealt with gender equality. One thing the stats found is that as gender opportunities in employment reached parity women largely abandoned traditional male jobs are returned to traditional female jobs. Having enough of a safety net not to worry about going hungry, homeless or without healthcare may be a contributing factor. But it seems as if when people really go by their preferences they gravitate toward professions that match the traditional gender stereotypes. An interesting bit was when they interviewed psychologists and social scientists, and they discounted the idea that there could be a preference difference between genders. They thought that if society were perfect that there would be a 50/50 split in any profession. Phooey.
In the US I think it's likely that men just don't want to be nurses. Some men do want that and there are male nurses, but it's rare. It doesn't have to be because they're afraid of perceptions. It can be because they don't desire to do that job.
For this particular question, it's hard for me to see that there's any real mystery involved. The push for more gender equality in traditionally male professions only shows up for professions associated with high status and/or high income (hence, STEM fields and upper management get lots of attention).
I have seen no similarly strong push to get women involved in (say) garbage collection, which is also traditionally male. Yes, equality there would be great, too, but that inequality isn't as big a factor in preventing women from an equal share of power and influence in society.
Meanwhile, there are efforts to get men involved in higher-status traditionally female jobs like nursing. But there simply aren't many high-status/high-paying jobs that are traditionally female... which is pretty much the point. (Looking at the article, I'm surprised to see psychologists/therapists presented as predominantly female. When I hear "psychologist", the first image that comes to mind is Freud.)
The crucial question is why can women cope with low paying jobs, and men can't. I think the notion that the father in a family should usually be the main breadwinner has a lot to do with that.
Women have the privilege to be able to choose a low paying profession (which offers more flexibility/time for family). The privilege is theirs because they control reproduction.
I've always found this to be an amusing counter-narrative: "if you're so concerned about the lack of women in finance, business, and technology, why aren't you concerned about the lack of men in teaching or secretarial work?" How is this not a self-answering question?
I would say that a much more concerning problem is that of male elementary school teachers and male childcare workers, at least here in the USA. There is automatic suspicion facing any man who wants to spend his days working with children. It takes only one accusation to end that man's career, regardless of evidence, regardless of what a great job he does. Nobody seems particularly concerned with this kind of sexism, nor with the real damage it can do, nor with the fact that it creates a line of work that only one gender is allowed to enter.
Let me put on my armchair psychologist hat and say:
I think it's due to the fact that in our society, men aren't socialized to think about feelings, and in fact, men are socialized to not have them. So it's not a surprise that these professions that require some form of feeling caring for one another lack men. For example teaching (sympathizing and empathizing with students and caring about their future), nursing (caring about patients well being and health), and PR (caring about the success of your customers) all require feeling.
[+] [-] busterarm|12 years ago|reply
In school, all he ever got was suspicion. All of the teachers and administrators and parents in schools treat male primary school teachers as if they're child molesters or think that men are totally unsuited to the job. There is _blatant_ sexism.
He lasted two years and now runs his own construction/carpentry business where he's a lot happier.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
1) if you're fine with the female workers changing your son/daughter's diaper, but not fine with the male teacher then you are part of the problem.
[+] [-] awjr|12 years ago|reply
'Something must be wrong with you'
[+] [-] zeidrich|12 years ago|reply
Is that man teaching because he needs a job, or because he enjoys teaching? Or does he just want to prey on the girls?
Is that woman developing video games because she's a good programmer, or is she just desperate for male attention?
The biggest difference is that fewer people see this as a problem when it's affecting men. Culturally men are expected to bear their problems instead of lament them.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Tichy|12 years ago|reply
- lower wages because of higher competition (the employer's incentive)
- more "attractive" workplace wink wink (the employee's perspective)
I know it's not politically correct to say that, but don't shoot the messenger.
I don't think men feel the need for more "female perspectives" in programming. Especially as they wouldn't even know what those would suppose to be.
Women (feminists) push for more women in tech because they have seen some people become rich via tech jobs and feel left out. They don't push for more garbage women and so on.
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johngalt|12 years ago|reply
I was somewhat blind to this until the wife opened a daycare in our home. When we interviewed with a new parent, she would very tactfully advise the parents that I might be in charge some days/times. The most common response was 'just let us know what days.' Which was code for: we aren't comfortable with that but we are too polite to say that while he's here. Less than half of the kids showed up the first time she took a day off. My paper airplane tournament was missing a number of contestants.
Then I had a few candid conversations with friends who had children. Almost universally wouldn't consider a male daycare provider. Or any daycare situation where a male would be even temporarily unsupervised with children.
It was disappointing to see that level of bigotry. While there aren't going to be men manning the barricades over daycare and teaching, it is something that should change. If you want your daughters to learn STEM, it might be a man teaching them. Try not to panic.
[+] [-] mililani|12 years ago|reply
Women are weird. They're exceptionally passive aggressive, and they love gossiping like there was a fire sale on it. It doesn't help that the few female OT's that I've had to shadow were not my cup of tea. I didn't think they were nice at all, and I could see them being overtly political or passive aggressive. Also, as others have mentioned in this thread, there is a very real bias I may have to contend with as a male in a female dominated profession.
Currently, I want to work in pediatrics. I like the idea of working in the schools and with kids. However, I DO see that others, especially women, may view that with a wary eye. It sucks.
There is a bright side though. If you're a single guy, damn, the women... Lots of pretty women. That's something that I don't miss about tech.
[+] [-] dgabriel|12 years ago|reply
http://aamn.org/ http://www.worldforumfoundation.org/working-groups/men/
[+] [-] betterunix|12 years ago|reply
It also does not help that here in the USA we are trained to be automatically suspicious of men who pursue two common and traditionally female lines of work: elementary school education and childcare. A male kindergarten teacher is always at risk of being branded a pedophile by some paranoid parent, and must watch his every step in his personal life (what if he is into S&M? what if he is gay?).
[+] [-] skylan_q|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] acomar|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmead|12 years ago|reply
the real answer is that men aren't exactly breaking down doors to get jobs were they'll be emasculated, underpaid or branded a pedophile.
[+] [-] hawkharris|12 years ago|reply
I think part of the reason is that many guys mistakenly associate PR with publicity and event planning — activities which they view as being "for women." In reality, modern public relations is deeply intertwined with management. It's about managing a company's relationships and persuading important audiences to take action.
Publicity and event planning are tools in modern PR. To say that they're the substance of the field is like saying that computer science is about keyboards and typing.
So, what's interesting here is that the field of public relations has evolved to encompass some things that are perceived as traditionally male, including business management, strategy and law. However, many men perceive the field as it was decades ago.
To answer the OP's question, maybe men don't push for men to break into traditionally female fields because, once those fields are branded as being "for women," they cease trying to understand how the fields evolve over time.
[+] [-] newnewnew|12 years ago|reply
Male underrepresentation in traditionally female fields is not considered a problem, again because males cannot be oppressed as a class. It is true that men have fared worse than women in the recession[1], and that men have fallen behind women in educational attainment, so that an influx of men into these fields might have strong, positive effects for society. But as long as the "patriarchy" remains, it will not be a concern.
[1] http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm
[+] [-] lemmsjid|12 years ago|reply
Modern feminism sees gender as a continuity rather than a boundary, and looks at how social gender constructs support systems of power. For example: why are men often stigmatized for becoming grade school teachers? The modern feminist (at least one with the theoretical bent you're describing) sees this as oppression and tries to come to grips with it by looking at the social constructs of masculinity and femininity, and more specifically in this case of maternity and paternity.
In a society where women are caregivers/mothers and men are builders/leaders, then individuals who do not embody those characteristics are marginalized and oppressed. And the marginalization goes both ways. In a society where men are stigmatized for embodying femininity, it will be true that women will be stigmatized for embodying masculinity.
The problem is discussed in a far more multidimensional fashion than you're describing. Marxism is used as a tool for analysis, as are many other ideologies, but is certainly not the dominant force. A (good) academic paper that uses Marxism for analysis will often say, "I'm using Marxism to analyze this topic because I feel that in spite of shortcomings A, B, and C, that I can use it to tease out this subtlety..."
I would go so far as to say that you are unapologetically building a caricature of what you're describing. Why? Because it's almost never the case that you can take an entire group of people, (in this case, the 'American academy') and apply such a sweeping generalization to their way of thought.
In fact, the modern feminist would suggest that it's your absolutist way of arguing that perpetuates this kind of system. When you say that a certain group thinks in a certain way (especially one so easily problematized), you are promulgating the same type of thinking that leads to, "Men shouldn't be teachers." The idea is that when you look at any crowd of people, do you understand that what you're looking at is not some group entity but in fact a very complex interweaving of social dynamics--personality, class, gender, sexuality, family, culture, race, age, height, weight, and all of the intersections thereof. Or do you think you have that group 'figured out' and pigeonholed? Once you have the group pigeonholed, you've denied the individuality and agency of the people in that group.
[+] [-] mattstreet|12 years ago|reply
Saying that men cannot be oppressed because they are the oppressors seems to come out mostly from MRA strawman talking points.
[+] [-] jamesaguilar|12 years ago|reply
One nuance that might be missing from your comment is that folks who believe this still agree that individual men can be oppressed. And some groups of men can be oppressed too -- black males come to mind. But generally, when talking about oppression, they/we are talking about systemic oppression, and would generally agree that men as a whole are not systemically oppressed, although they theoretically could be if women ever became the dominant gender.
[+] [-] ThomPete|12 years ago|reply
So if anything men are both the most oppressing and most oppressed class of society.
Furthermore woman normally marry upwards which makes it even harder for those already at the bottom to find a life companion and escape their situation.
[+] [-] mildtrepidation|12 years ago|reply
I'm not a cultural anthropologist, so I'm not going to bother suggesting this Marxist origin theory is wrong or even not a large contributor, but I will certainly point out that you're reducing something very large and very complex involving a whole lot of vastly different people with different motivations, backgrounds, and goals to a simple, homogeneous, no-moving-parts summary that's so burdened with subjective assumptions as to be unsupportable.
[+] [-] dragonwriter|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shardling|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gametheoretic|12 years ago|reply
>Why are women fighting for more women to do STEM while men are not fighting for more men to be therapists?
...and Freakonomics hears: "Why don't more men pursue female-dominated professions?" Not once, but twice. Alfred writes back to clarify his meaning, yet Dubner, again, simply lifts keywords out of his sentences and writes his own question to answer. Literally failing to think outside the bounds of political tropes.
[+] [-] Danieru|12 years ago|reply
In their defence I think the two questions have high interrelation. Why men should go into teaching and etc is the same reasons men are not campaigning for more male participation. Programming is a good career so people are willing to fight for equality. From an emotionless stand point teaching is a mediocre career so what is the point? Men who do teach do so for the caring, but they recognize the career is not for everyone. Programming on the other hand is profitable, I imagine programming women recognize that the career would be a good match for many other women.
By a similar token neither men nor women are campaigning to get more people into sanitation engineering, even if women are under represented.
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnbm|12 years ago|reply
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15491274
[+] [-] lnanek2|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dingaling|12 years ago|reply
http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/working-in-the-nhs/pay-and-bene...
Band definitions here:
http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/explore-by-career/nursing/pay-f...
One might say that's not a lot of money for the stress and responsibility, but it's still starting at the UK average salary.
[+] [-] protomyth|12 years ago|reply
1) My buddy said their bill rate was from $60+/hour
2) he did a 70 / 30 split if you were W2 and a 90/10 split if you were 1099. He also hired a security company to escort the nurses to and from the parking lot. This is a concern at some hospitals.
[+] [-] camus|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steuard|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johngalt|12 years ago|reply
May I ask what criteria you used to come to that conclusion? What do you use to measure equality? You seem to have analyzed both sides and I'm curious to hear how you arrived at your conclusion.
[+] [-] knowtheory|12 years ago|reply
So, languages and dialects have some sort of (nebulously defined) level of prestige relative to any particular population, and the prestige of a particular language/dialect is one of those factors for a bunch of cultural phenomena, such as where and whether it's appropriate to use a particular language/dialect in a particular social setting, and whether a language is taught to children, etc, etc, etc.
Anyway, point being, prestige is also one of those things you see in careers too. It may be that there aren't more men banging down the doors to get into dietetics and nursing because those jobs aren't perceived to be as prestigious as being a doctor.
People aspire to being the President of the United States, or a doctor, or lawyer or whatever. They don't aspire to being middle management, or nursing home attendants, or city clerks.
(p.s. I think that gender imbalance in any field is questionable/problematic. But on a pragmatic basis there's actual material harm when all of the prestigious and high earning fields are particularly biased.)
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|12 years ago|reply
First, even just the fact that it seems perfectly legit to call him a "manny" was enough. I can't even imagine how much the internet would explode if someone questioned hiring "womengineers."
Second, the fact that the question is even asked. Like there is something EXTRA we need to look at when hiring a man as a nanny that we would not look at for a woman. Skills are skills. A background check is a background check.
Lastly, I was appalled by the women that spoke up about how sketchy it was and that they would advise against it. Thankfully, there were people that spoke up about it being no different. That it would be great to have our boys see a man in such a role.
Ultimately, he didn't make the cut. But this was not a male/female reason. But seeing what I saw, I do feel a bit sorry for the guy as I'm sure this happens more than he knows. I'm sure he has missed out on great jobs because too many of people's friends thought it was too sketchy.
[+] [-] dwc|12 years ago|reply
In the US I think it's likely that men just don't want to be nurses. Some men do want that and there are male nurses, but it's rare. It doesn't have to be because they're afraid of perceptions. It can be because they don't desire to do that job.
[+] [-] johnbm|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Steuard|12 years ago|reply
I have seen no similarly strong push to get women involved in (say) garbage collection, which is also traditionally male. Yes, equality there would be great, too, but that inequality isn't as big a factor in preventing women from an equal share of power and influence in society.
Meanwhile, there are efforts to get men involved in higher-status traditionally female jobs like nursing. But there simply aren't many high-status/high-paying jobs that are traditionally female... which is pretty much the point. (Looking at the article, I'm surprised to see psychologists/therapists presented as predominantly female. When I hear "psychologist", the first image that comes to mind is Freud.)
[+] [-] Tichy|12 years ago|reply
Women have the privilege to be able to choose a low paying profession (which offers more flexibility/time for family). The privilege is theirs because they control reproduction.
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
It should also be noted that the percentage of male nurses, while still small (10%) has tripled in four decades, and male nurses earn more than female one: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/25/men-nur....
[+] [-] betterunix|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] physcab|12 years ago|reply
I think it's due to the fact that in our society, men aren't socialized to think about feelings, and in fact, men are socialized to not have them. So it's not a surprise that these professions that require some form of feeling caring for one another lack men. For example teaching (sympathizing and empathizing with students and caring about their future), nursing (caring about patients well being and health), and PR (caring about the success of your customers) all require feeling.